Heres the crucial SSD SMART info from Crucial Executive

ID Description Current Value Units
1 Raw Read Error Rate 0 Errors/Page
5 Retired NAND Blocks 0 NAND Blocks
9 Power On Hours Count 53 Hours
12 Power Cycle Count 1 Cycles
171 Program Fail Count 0 NAND Page Program Failures
172 Erase Fail Count 0 NAND Block Erase Failures
173 Average Block-Erase Count 0 Erases
174 Unexpected Power Loss Count 0 Unexpected Power Loss events
180 Unused reserved block count 5569 Blocks
183 SATA Interface Downshift 0 Downshifts
184 Error Correction Count 0 Correction Events
187 Reported Uncorrectable Errors 0 ECC Correction Failures
194 Enclosure Temperature 29 Current Temperature (C)
31 Highest Lifetime Temperature (C)
196 Reallocation Event Count 0 Events
197 Current Pending Sector Count 0 512 Byte Sectors
198 SMART Off-line Scan Uncorrectable Errors 0 Errors
199 Ultra-DMA CRC Error Count 0 Errors
202 Percentage Lifetime Used 0 % Lifetime Used
206 Write Error Rate 0 Program Fails/MB
210 RAIN Successful Recovery Page Count 0 TUs successfully recovered by RAIN
246 Cumulative Host Write Sector Count 445940599 512 Byte Sectors
247 Host Program Page Count 14442906 NAND Page
248 FTL Program Page Count 16188749 NAND Page

Thinking about the figures I posted earlier. I can't believe they're correct. For a 1TB drive over 5 years, to have written less than 1TB over the 5 years, and read only a little over 1.33TB seems incredibly low. I have many files of 50GB or more on the drive which are rewritten every so often. And it is the only internal drive on the PC holding all System and data files.

No, I'm having difficulty in believing SeaTools. Unless the numbers have wrapped round...

I'll be installing an SSD in a few days and restoring to it a Windows 7 created system image. Given that the image was from an HDD-based system, will that image work on an SSD or will it have the wrong drivers or whatever?

Or maybe Windows will be smart enough to reconfigure for the SSD.

Win 10 will detect SSD after a clone not sure about 7.

You may need to enable TRIM manually -- Linky

As far as drivers are concerned, a SATA device is a SATA device. However, you might want to consider switching to ACPI mode if not already configured this way. (You can easily find instructions via Google.) As others have said, there are other changes that you might like to consider to optimise performance.

Do you mean ACPI or AHCI? Google throws up lots of references to AHCI and my BIOS has that as an option.

Not appreciating that it is only relevant to SSD drives, I did try changing from IDE to AHCI but Windows failed to boot. Have to wait till the SSD is installed so I can change it for that drive only - I hope.

I've also read that cloning a Windows installation from HDD to SSD can cause problems in that Windows doesn't access the SSD efficiently, for example

In reference to www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/284280-32-windows-install-clone:

Do a clean install of windows 7 and let the windows install creat the partition for you. This will make sure that your allocation unit size is the default 4096 and that the alignment of the partitions starting point is correct for that particular SSD. If you simply clone the old platter driver the alignment will be off and the SSD will not perform well.

Platter HDs us a partition offset of 63 empty blocks where a SSD should be set at 64 blocks. The windows 7 install will set this for you automaticlly when it creates the new partition on your new SSD.

I'm coming to the conclusion that I'll be better doing a fresh install of Windows 7. Wouldn't be the first.

Sorry, my bad. Yes I meant AHCI. The change will affect all drives (for the better). You need to go through a process to effect the change, but it is quite easy (or it was for me): http://www.neowin.net/news/neowin-guide-how-to-chang...

Good cloning software will make sure that the partitions are properly aligned. I think most partition managers allow you to adjust it if necessary.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

As far as drivers are concerned, a SATA device is a SATA device. However, you might want to consider switching to ACPI mode if not already configured this way. (You can easily find instructions via Google.) As others have said, there are other changes that you might like to consider to optimise performance.

i wonder if AHCI makes a lot of difference? i will have to have a search later when I get home from work and see if there are any bench marks.

There are loads of benchmarks around, almost all of which recommend the change. It's not a huge difference (about 5-10% in most tests) but it's free.