A clone can boot perfectly and still leave two invisible things wrong: TRIM off, or partitions misaligned. Both quietly tax an SSD — one slows it down over months, the other wastes its effort on every write. Two checks, five minutes, total certainty.
SSDs are not just faster hard disks; they maintain themselves differently. TRIM is how Windows tells the SSD which blocks are truly empty, so the drive can keep its write speed as it fills and ages. Alignment is whether your partitions start at boundaries the SSD's internal pages agree with — misaligned partitions make the drive do double work on ordinary writes. The good news, stated plainly: a Macrium Reflect clone onto an SSD normally gets both right by itself, because Windows enables TRIM for recognised SSDs and Reflect aligns partitions to SSD-friendly boundaries during the copy. This page is how you verify that, and what to do in the rare case a check fails.
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotifyfsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0 from an admin terminal, then run the query again to confirmWhy it might be off at all: Windows sets this based on the drive it detects. If your SSD arrived through a USB adapter during cloning, Windows may not have classified it properly at that moment; once it is installed internally and recognised as an SSD, the setting normally rights itself. The query takes ten seconds — just run it.
Aligned partitions start at offsets divisible by 1 MB (1,048,576 bytes) — the boundary every modern cloning tool uses for SSDs. Check yours:
Get-Partition -DriveLetter C | Select-Object DiskNumber, PartitionNumber, OffsetGet-Partition | Select-Object DiskNumber, PartitionNumber, Offset and check each offset the same wayHonest expectation: after a Reflect clone this check passes. It fails mainly on systems cloned with ancient tools or restored from very old images. If yours somehow fails, the practical fix is not an in-place shuffle — it is a fresh clone with a current tool, because moving a live system partition's start point is specialist surgery with real risk.
One related click completes the picture. Open Defragment and Optimize Drives, select the SSD, and confirm two things: the media type reads Solid state drive (Windows knows what it is), and scheduled optimisation is on. For an SSD this tool does not defragment — it sends a retrim, tidying exactly what TRIM is for. If the drive is misreported as a hard disk here, that misclassification is worth fixing first (a driver or connection issue), because Windows makes several SSD decisions from this one label.
Skip the folklore. Do not disable the page file, indexing or Superfetch because an old forum post said SSDs prefer it — modern Windows manages all three with SSDs in mind. Do not run a traditional defragmenter on the SSD. And do not install "SSD tweaker" utilities to fix checks you have already verified pass — the two commands on this page are the whole audit, and they are free.
DisableDeleteNotify = 0 means TRIM is working. More clones have been fixed into a worse state by people misreading that zero than by any real fault. Zero is the answer you want — if you see it, close the terminal and enjoy the SSD.
These checks take less time than the video's clone itself — run them right after your first successful boot from the SSD, while the video's steps are still fresh.
▶️ Watch Full VideoCheck that the PC actually booted from the SSD (the first-boot guide in this set), that the drive is not nearly full — SSDs slow down when packed to the last percent — and that it is connected to a SATA 3 port rather than an old SATA 2 port on a desktop. TRIM is one factor among several, not a magic switch.
Alignment is decided by the cloning software, not the cable — Reflect aligns correctly either way. TRIM is a Windows-to-drive conversation that matters once the SSD is installed and in daily use; verify it with the fsutil check after the SSD is in its final home, which is exactly when this guide tells you to run it.
Once after the upgrade is enough for alignment — it never changes afterwards. TRIM only needs a re-check if you change storage drivers, restore an old image, or notice the drive steadily slowing over months. These are verify-once settings, not weekly chores.