New T530: same boot time after cloning HDD to SSD - what to do next to optimize performanc​e?

Question

Hi,
This is my very first post here so bear with me if I have not observed any guidelines.
After I got a new T530 from Lenovo (i5-3230M, 8G RAM 1DIMM, 500GB 7200rpm HDD, 1920x1080, 16GB Micro SSD SATA3, NVIDIA Optimus with 1GB), I swapped the DVD burner with the 500GB HDD and put a 128GB Samsung 840 Pro as my primary drive. I cloned all HDD contents to the SSD and removed all stuff in the HDD (I don't have a Windows 7 disk that's why I didn't do a clean install on the SSD). After these changes, I found my boot time to still be 30 seconds - which I guess is quite slow for an SSD main drive.
I've read up a fair bit on the Lenovo Community and the ThinkPad forum for solutions but have not found a conclusive answer to this problem. I guess I just want some advice from experienced users on what to do next after cloing the HDD to the SSD so that I can optimize the SSD's performance.
1) I found the 16GB Micro SSD SATA3 is named "Lenovo_Recovery (Q". As I don't have a Windows 7 installation disk, is it possible for me to perform a clean install on my SSD C: Drive from the Recovery?
2) If recovery is not possible, I am thinking of removing some of the bloatware(Corel burner, Nitro Pro, and many ThinkVantage utilities). But I also read somewhere that simply removing them does not help much (as opposed to a clean install). Is there anything Lenovo software worth saving (power manager maybe?)
To be sure both my TRIM and AHCI are enabled. I welcome and am grateful for inputs of other advice outside the above two questions: for example whether I should disable paging files or set paging files to the 500GB HDD disk; whether I should create a RAM disk, whether I should delete or shift system retore files, or whether I should change locations for certain temporary files.
Many thanks for your input
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Answer 1

MHK wrote:
1) I found the 16GB Micro SSD SATA3 is named "Lenovo_Recovery (Q". As I don't have a Windows 7 installation disk, is it possible for me to perform a clean install on my SSD C: Drive from the Recovery?
You're already getting detailed advice here.  I'm just chiming it to say that the above doesn't sound quite right.
Lenovo_Recovery (Q) is normally a partition on the main drive and contains the recovery image.  It wouldn't be on the micro SSD - AFAIK.  The recovery image contains an as-shipped image of your working partitions.  Even if you used it, you wouldn't get what's considered a "clean" install (from MS media and without the Lenovo additions).  You'd get the OS as shipped - modified and added-to by Lenovo.
That micro SSD is probably part of the reason you don't see much difference in your boot times.  It caches frequently-used files and (at least once trained or pre-loaded) sort of simulates running from an SSD.  Without it your original boot time would probably have been longer.
[edit] Did you make recovery media from your HDD before removing it from the main bay.  I'm all for clean installs (how I run my T420) but that might be handy to have down the road some time.  Also you might want to pull a copy of SWTOOLS (I think that's what it's called these days...) and save it on DVD or someplace.  There are a few things you can't download from the Lenovo site (3rd-party multimedia apps, for example) that you might want to add to a clean install later. The installers are in SWTOOLS (or whatever it's called....)
FWIW,
Z.
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