3 Ways to Mirror a Hard Drive on Windows 10

Hard drive failure is a serious problem because you can permanently lose your data, and this is why many choose to mirror a hard drive in Windows 10 as a way to back up their data.

Mirroring a hard drive isn’t as complicated as you think, and in today’s guide, we’re going to show you a couple of ways you can do that on your PC.

Benefits of hard drive mirroring

• All your data is written to the backup drive in real time, and the mirroring process doesn’t require scheduling, unlike the cloning process.
• In case of sudden disk failure, you can continue using the backup drive without any disruption.
• Drastically reduces the downtime of any system which can be important if you maintain a local server.
• Disk mirroring is scalable, and you can seamlessly add more drives for additional recovery partitions.

How do I clone a hard drive on Windows 10?

1. Use Disk Management

1. Press the Windows key + X and choose Disk Management.
2. Select the primary drive that you want to use as the source, right-click it, and choose Add Mirror.
3. Select the drive letter of the secondary drive that you want to use for mirroring and choose Add Mirror.
4. You’ll be asked to convert the basic disk to a dynamic disk. Click Yes to proceed.
5. Wait for a few moments for the process to finish.

2. Use Storage Spaces

1. Press the Windows key + S and type storage spaces. Select Manage Storage Spaces.
2. Navigate to Create a new pool and storage space.
3. Select the drives you want to use.
4. Next, configure the size of the mirror drive and set the Resiliency type to a Two-way mirror.
5. Click on Create Storage Space and wait for the process to finish.

3. Use diskpart

1. Press the Windows key + X and choose PowerShell (Admin).
2. Once it starts, enter diskpart and press Enter.
3. Enter the list disk to show all drives on your PC.
4. Locate the drive that you want to use as the source disk. We used disk 1 in this example: select disk 1
5. Next, run the following command: convert dynamic
6. Now repeat the previous two steps for a disk that you want to use as the destination disk.
7. Run the following command to create a mirror volume: create volume mirror disk=1
8. Finally, you need to add the other disk with this command: add disk=0

Troubleshooting common issues with mirroring a hard drive on Windows 10

1. Use chkdsk to fix drive cloning errors and corrupt files

1. Press the Windows key + X and choose PowerShell (Admin).
2. Run the following command chkdsk c: /r
3. If the drive is damaged, the damaged sectors can cause issues with cloning.

2. Use Disk Management to fix unallocated space after cloning

1. Open Disk Management.
2. 找到具有未分配空间的磁盘，右键单击它，然后选择扩展。
3. 配置要添加到驱动器的空间量，然后单击下一步。按照屏幕上的说明完成该过程。

在 Windows 10 上优化镜像驱动器的其他提示

• 为了使镜像正常工作，辅助磁盘的大小必须与源驱动器相同或更大。
• 如果您需要更高的可靠性，请考虑使用三个驱动器而不是两个驱动器进行镜像并创建两个副本。
• 使用来自可靠制造商的高质量驱动器来延长驱动器的使用寿命。
• 如果可能，请使用硬件 RAID，因为它提供更好的性能，并且与软件选项不同，它不依赖于您的操作系统。

镜像是防止突发硬件故障的好方法，并且由于它是内置的 Windows 功能，因此不需要克隆软件.

您曾经在 PC 上使用过磁盘镜像吗？如果是这样，请在下面的评论中与我们分享您的经验。