I have a spare computer up and running, so no real time pressure. And the time since I replaced the hard drive with the SSD was aparently longer than I thought, because the old drive still has Windows 7 on it -- I thought I had upgraded to Windows 10 before installing the SSD drive.
BUT ... one of my hints that things were not right with the SSD drive was that AutoCAD stopped working -- and I wasn't able to get the installation program to run, so I couldn't repair it. The old drive still was a working copy of AutoCAD on it. So that pretty well sets my plan -- clone the old hard disk drive to a new SSD drive, install the new SSD drive, and then do an upgrade to Windows 10 -- probably using the .ISO for 21H2 I just made a couple of days ago.
Re SSD failure, I posted this a couple days ago on my Book of Faces, referencing a "FB memory" about the first SSD failure I'd seen, from 2017:
-----from the BookFace-------"And by now we've seen a bunch more.
"They tend to fail in much the same way as standard hard disks do. Some go "poof" and instantly fail. Most that fail fail more slowly, with accumulating bad sectors*, or performance problems**.
"So, if in doubt, run the manufacturer's diagnostic. Short test, >>and<< long test. And if that says there's a problem, believe it. And keep your data backed up.
"-------------------------------------------
"'*Bad sectors' -- obviously there's something else going under the hood, memory cells failing or whatnot, that's being presented to us in metaphor of a traditional hard disk.
"** I had one a few weeks ago. I'd installed it at the beginning of the year. In Nov. it starts taking a long, long time to boot. Put the drive on my shop pc. Linux smartctl diag said there was some unspecified error with the drive. File system was still accessible, so I used ddrescue to clone to an image. That clone, for a 240GB disk, took >>3 days<< to complete. (It should take an hour or two at most.) But, all data was recovered. Ddrescue reported a small number of unreadable spots."