How to Clone M.2 SSD with Only One Slot? See a Full Guide!

How to clone an M.2 SSD on a computer with only one M.2 slot? This article will provide a step-by-step guide to cloning a single-slot M.2 SSD in Windows 11/10 systems.

The M.2 SSD is a solid-state drive that looks like a piece of chewing gum. It is compact and perfect for thin and light laptops, ultrabooks and tablets. Compared with mSATA SSD, M.2 SSD has faster read and write speeds.

However, over time and data accumulation, the speed of the M.2 SSD may slow down. If you don't want to delete any data or reinstall the system, you might consider cloning the M.2 SSD to a larger SSD. If the SSD fails, cloning is also a good choice. Next, we'll show you how to clone an M.2 SSD with only one slot.

Related Reading: Is the Windows 11/10 system SSD running slow? Fix it now!

Preparation for computers when only one slot

Today, most laptops only have one M.2 slot for SSD installation. Typically, cloning an NVME M.2 SSD to another larger SSD requires two slots. What if your computer has only one slot?

There is still a workaround. You can try two ways:

1. Prepare an M.2 to USB converter/adapter or M.2 SSD external box and connect a second M.2 drive to your computer. You can then migrate everything to the target disk by cloning.
2. If you don't have an adapter, you can create a disk backup for the original M.2 SSD, make a bootable USB drive, replace the old NVME M.2 SSD with the new M.2 drive, and restore the system to the new SSD.

The second method does not involve cloning, but backup and recovery. If you care how to use the first method "Clone the operating system from an M.2 SSD to an M.2 SSD with only one M.2 slot" or "How to clone an M.2 SSD with only one slot", continue reading to find a step-by-step guide.

How to clone an M.2 SSD with only one slot via adapter

To efficiently clone your M.2 drive, you need a hard disk cloning software. Here we recommend MiniTool ShadowMaker, which can easily clone a hard disk to another disk with its "Clone Disk" feature. Specifically, it supports cloning HDDs to SSDs, moving Windows to another drive, and allowing you to clone SSDs to larger SSDs in just a few clicks.

Now download and install it on your single M.2 slot computer for disk cloning.

See how to clone an NVME SSD with only one slot:

Step 1: Connect the new M.2 drive to your computer via the M.2 to USB adapter.

Step 2: Launch MiniTool ShadowMaker and click to continue trial .

Step 3: Click Tools in the left panel and click Clone Disk .

Step 4: Select the old M.2 drive as the source drive and the new M.2 SSD as the target drive.

Step 5: Click Start . Next, if you cloned the system disk, please purchase a license to register this cloning software. Then, start the cloning process.

After the cloning is complete, close the computer, open the computer case, remove the old hard drive, and put the new M.2 SSD in place. You can then boot the computer from the cloned SSD. If Windows cannot boot from a cloned SSD, please refer to this guide to find a solution – cloned drive/SSD cannot boot Windows 11/10/8/7? Fix it.

If you do not have an adapter to clone the M.2 SSD to a larger SSD, you can also migrate the entire disk to a new SSD – Run MiniTool ShadowMaker, go to Backup Backup the disk to an external drive or USB drive, click the Media Builder in the Tools to create a bootable USB drive, turn off the computer to remove the old SSD and install the new M.2 SSD into a single slot, then boot the computer from the bootable USB drive and run MiniTool ShadowMaker, and restore the disk backup to the new SSD.

Summarize

Cloning an SSD to a larger SSD is a good choice to ensure optimal performance. If your computer only has one M.2 slot, what can you do? This article describes how to clone an M.2 SSD with only one slot using MiniTool ShadowMaker. Additionally, you can perform disk backup and recovery, which can achieve the same purpose as disk cloning. Just follow your situation.

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