Windows 10 Slow after Clone – Try These Five Ways

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By Dervish / Last Updated January 4, 2022

Overview of Windows 10 slow after clone

Nowadays, SSD is becoming more and more popular because of its powerful read and write
performance. After purchasing an SSD, users always choose to clone the system from HDD to
SSD to avoid reinstalling Windows. However, according to some users, Windows 10 is slow
after clone to SSD. Actually, the most common reason for this issue is because of the wrong
configuration of SSD, so that the SSD could not be in its best state. Next, I’ll introduce you
five methods to optimize SSD.

Method 1. Enable AHCI

To get better performance of SSD, you can set SATA controller to AHCI (Advanced Host
Controller Interface) mode in BIOS, which works better with SSD. You can follow the steps
below to enable AHCI.

1. While in Windows, press the Win+R keys to open Run, type regedit, and click on OK to
open Registry Editor.
2. In the left pane of Registry Editor, browse to the key location below.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorV

3. In the right pane of the iaStorV key, double-click on the Start DWORD to modify it.

4. Type 0 for AHCI, and click on OK.

Method 2. Turn off System Restore

System Restore is a feature that allows you to restore your computer to a point where it is
working fine. As the system restore periodically takes snapshots of your computer, the
snapshots will be accumulated. As times go by, it will take up much space of system partition
on SSD and influence your computer speed. Therefore, you can turn off System Restore to
free up some space on SSD.

1. Type System Restore in the start menu, select Create a restore point.

2. Select a drive and click Configure.

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3. Change Restore Settings to Disable system protection, then click OK.

Method 3. Disable Disk Indexing

Indexing is a good feature designed to provide quick access to files or folders on a hard drive,
but it becomes pointless on an SSD. It is recommended to disable disk indexing to decrease
the rights to the SSD.

To optimize SSD on Windows 10 by disabling disk indexing:

1. Right-clicking on the specific drive in This Computer, and selecting Properties.

2. Under the General tab, uncheck “Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in
addition to file properties” to disable disk indexing.

Method 4. Do not Defrag

As it is known, disk defragmentation is very helpful for HDD, but it will have a negative
impact on SSD. You can schedule defrag HDD to keep Windows 10 performance. But if you
are using SSD, you can manually disable the defragmentation.

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1. Right-click on any drive connected to your PC and select Properties from the context
menu.

2. Select the Tools tab, and then click the Optimize button under the “Optimize and
defragment drive” section.

Click on the Change settings

button.

3. Uncheck the “Run on a schedule”

box to disable automatic drive
optimization completely. Or click on
the Choose button to turn off
automatic optimization for individual
drives.

4. Click OK and you’re done.

Method 5. SSD 4K alignment

SSD adopts the smallest 4K sector in file system to save data. If the 4K sector is not aligned in
SSD, the performance of SSD could be affected. To check if the 4K sector is aligned, press
Windows + R key combo to start Run. Type “msinfo32” and hit Enter. Then go to
Components>Storage>Disks and look for your SSD and check the Partition Starting
Offset. It needs to be divisible by 4096; otherwise, the SSD block is not alignment correct.

To align SSD, you can use AOMEI Partition Assistant. It is a professional disk manager which
is designed for Windows 10/8/7/Visa/XP. Let’s see how to align SSD step by step.

Step 1. Download, install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant. Right-click the partition you
want to align and select Advanced > Partition Alignment.

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Step 2. in the pop-up window, select 4096 sector from the given list and click OK.

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Step 3. Click Apply > Proceed to execute the operation.

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Conclusion
If your Windows 10 is slow after clone, you can try the methods above to optimize SSD. For
users who haven’t cloned hard drive or partition to SSD yet can use Copy Disk feature or
Migrate OS to SSD feature of AOMEI Partition Assistant to optimize SSD during the process
of clone.

In addition, AOMEI Partition Assistant has many other useful features. For example, you can
create a portable Windows 7 USB drive with Windows To Go Creator function. You can also
convert between FAT32 and NTFS. All in all, it is an awesome disk manager, do not miss it.

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