Drive Cloners

Drive cloners are an amazing tool to have when upgrading a pc from a standard HDD (Hard Disk Drive) to an SSD (Solid State Drive). Cloning your hard drive moves the entire drive, including the Operating system and all your programs, pictures, and important documents. If your drive fails, you'd be able to swap the drive and be up and running before you know it.

Even in 2023, we've come across some older PCs and Laptops running mechanical drives. Using a Drive cloner, you can easily upgrade the HDD to an SSD and notice a tremendous speed bump in the way your computer runs.

There are different types of cloners - Offline cloners, which do not require additional software or hardware, and online cloners that require additional software.

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Offline Cloners

The WAVLINK offline cloner is a great tool to use. It just requires power and two drives. It comes with the power supply and a USB A/C cable to connect to your pc to use as a hard drive docking station.

The WAVLINK works with a standard HHD and can clone to an SSD. It has two bays labeled Source and Target. Insert the hard drive that's going to be replaced into the Source Bay. In the Target Bay, place the SSD or blank hard drive. Press and hold the power button on the front for about 10 seconds and then the magic begins. The light indicator on the front shows the progress in 4 quarters.

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Online Cloners

Are essentially docking bays that require additional software like EaseUS Partition Master (a paid program) or MiniTool Partition Wizard (free). These will clone your hard drive but will render the pc that's running the software un-useable until its completed.

When using a Hard Drive docking station like, the INSIGNIA Docking Station, you'll be required to use an online cloner. In this case, it doesn't matter what slot the new hard drive sits in or the old one since you'll be selecting the source hard drive through the program and the destination accordingly. Some software will require the computer to reboot for the process to start and finish.

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It's important to note that cloning a hard drive can be time consuming and varies depending on the size of the hard drive being cloned. Read/Write speed of the old hard drive and the new hard drive also play a factor in how long it can take to clone a hard drive.