Mirroring HDD to New SSD

byalexandr · December 25, 2015

So my shiny new Samsung 850 EVO 500GB gets here Tuesday (29th), and I want to mirror everything on my current HDD to the new SSD to save time and effort. So right now I'm cleaning up the disk as much as I can, deleting the Windows.old folder, useless programs, downloads, etc. to make more room and lessen the time it takes for the program to finish mirroring.

The program I will be using will be Macrium Reflect, the free Home Edition. So I want to do some things before I mirror everything to the new SSD, so that I get the optimum performance out of the SSD, and I have a few questions:

1. Should I defragment my HDD after I finish cleaning the disk before I start the mirroring process? Will this help the SSD at all?

2. Does the 850 EVO have TRIM or whatever the term is?

3. If so, should I do this using the disk defrag tool in Windows? (It won't defrag, I know that's bad for SSDs but Windows recognizes SSDs so it will do the TRIM operation instead).

4. Should I just mirror it over and that's it? I'm going to enable the RAPID mode since I have 16GB of RAM, but is there anything else I can do to help the SSD work optimally?

5. Do SSDs have the same effect as HDDs where the more you fill it's capacity the slower it gets?

Sorry if I'm overreacting I guess. It's just a really nice SSD and I want it to work as fast as it can and last as long as it can. Just curious of what I should do to help out the mirroring process, and I just want to get everything nice and clean and in the right order since I won't be doing a clean install. Thanks!