what to put on SSD and how to do it

use a 8g usb stick and make a new windows 10 boot iso. install windows clean on the ssd with the hard drive unplug. when it done plug the hard drive back in and point steam to the old folder. you have to reinstall all your programs unless you want tto try a drive copy program.

Your best bet is to do a clean install of Windows on the SSD. Often there is migration software or you could use imaging software, but this can quite often leads to problems. Also if you have more data on your boot drive than the maximum size of your SSD, then migration is out.

So my advice to you is to disconnect your boot drive that you are using right now. This way if something goes wrong, you can always go back to your original boot drive. Connect your SSD to the SATA port that you were using for your HDD (presumably) and install Windows 10 on it. Then install your drivers, and Windows updates. Make sure that Windows activates properly. Then install your non-gaming programs. Once you are sure that you have your computer booting up properly from the SSD, then reconnect your HDD to another SATA port. Back up any data you need from this drive (hopefully you have a large external HDD to back up to) and then format your HDD. Then you can proceed to install your games (STEAM, Origin, etc) to the freshly formatted HDD. You can speed this up a bit by backing up your entire STEAM directory. After installing STEAM, log in the first time. Then exit STEAM and overwrite the newly installed STEAM directory with your backup and restart STEAM. In my experience most games will run (after downloading the prerequisites like VC Redistributable etc) without issue. Some games may not launch or give an error. In these cases, usually a game cache verify will sort it out. In rare cases the game may still refuse to run. In this case, just uninstall the game in question and then re-install it. This procedure can also be done for Origin, though it may not work as well as it does for STEAM.

Personally I only use my SSD for Windows, Office, and non-gaming software. All my games and user files I keep on the hard drive.

Yes unplug your HDD, connect the SSD to the HDD's SATA cable and install Windows. Get everything running (drivers, Windows updates, non-gaming apps) to your satisfaction. Then if you like, we can give you step by step what to do afterwards. Do you have a large external HDD to make a backup to?

plug in into slot 1 if you can slot 0 is for the boot drive.

Slot shouldn't really matter, depending on bios setting it will use the right one to boot anyway, or can be changed to.

On some motherboards first few connectors can be faster than others, but they are usually in pairs anyway.

Have you gotten all the drivers, Windows updates and non-gaming apps installed on the SSD? Do you have it running to your satisfaction?

If so, reconnect the HDD to a SATA port. Normally to keep things straight, I put the boot device on the lowest numbered SATA port and then the HDD on the next lowest, then ODD. However the BIOS can be told what is the boot device, so this is more semantics and a practice I like to follow rather than a rule. Something left over from the early days with IDE drives and less sophisticated BIOS. Once you have it plugged in, boot and go into the BIOS and make sure that A) the drive appears and B) that the SSD is listed as your boot device. If this is all good, boot into Windows. It should boot from the SSD, but I've heard on rare occasions that if the BIOS detects two boot drives, it will hang, or boot the wrong drive. Hopefully you'll boot fine from the SSD. Once in Windows you can start backing up all the stuff from your HDD to an external HDD which I hope you have since you didn't answer that question.

I would start with your user files (Document, Downloads, Music, Pictures, etc), back up each folder separately. Now you'll need to find these in X:\User\yourusername\ , not the ones on C since these are located on the SSD and empty. So when you are done, you'll have a Documents, Downloads, Music,,, on your external HDD. Now this procedure assumes you'd like to keep your user files off of the SSD and on the HDD. If you want to just have them on the SSD, then it's just a matter of copying the contents of each user folder from the HDD to the corresponding user folder on your SSD. This is a personal decision as it's a personal preference. I prefer keeping my SSD just for Windows and non-gaming stuff.

Now if you want to save some time, back up your STEAM folder. and Origin if you have it. STEAM is located at X:\Program Files (x86)\Steam. Now the easiest way is to just backup the entire STEAM folder. If your STEAM folder is large, its going to take awhile to backup.

If you have Origin, the procedure is the similar. The default location for it is X:\Programs Files (x86)\Origin, again back up the entire folder. Again depending on how many games you have in Origin, this could take awhile.

You'll notice that I used X as the drive letter in the instructions above, the reason for this is I'm not sure what letter Windows will assign to your HDD, it could be D if you don't have a CD/DVD/BD-ROM on your system, or it could be E or F depending on what drives were connected at the time you installed Windows.

Once you've backed up all your files to your satisfaction, it is time to go into Disk Management (Win Key + X). Locate your HDD and right click any / all partitions on it (since it was your boot drive it could have as many as 4 partitions, maybe more if you manually made more) one at a a time and select Delete Volume. This will delete the entries from the partition table on the drive. When you are done, you should be left with the entire drive as Unallocated space. Then right click the drive and select New Simple Volume and follow the partition wizard. Presumably you'll want the entire drive as one large partition. If this isn't the case, you'll need to change the Simple volume size in MB value to the size you want.

With your partition(s) made and formatted, you are ready to install your games. Download and install STEAM and Origin if applicable. There are two ways to install STEAM and Origin so the games go on the HDD, I will describe the one I used. In the install wizard, you'll be asked where to install STEAM / Origin, direct it to a folder on your HDD. For instance I select my HDD and the folder name STEAM, with this the installer created the STEAM folder on my D drive and installed STEAM to this location. Once STEAM is installed, login for the first time. Allow it to update / do whatever. In your library, you should see all your games listed there, but they are greyed out since none of them are installed. At this point, you need to exit STEAM either by clicking Steam at the top and selecting Exit, or by right clicking the STEAM icon in the System Tray and selecting Exit. Either way, you don't want STEAM running in the background when you restore your saved files.

Now go to your backup and find your STEAM backup you made. Open the backup Steam folder and copy all it's contents to the newly installed STEAM folder. Now just to reiterate, you are copying the contents of the backup Steam folder, not the Steam folder itself. This will result in overwriting all the folders in your installed Steam folder with your backup. This will take awhile. Once it's done, then you can start STEAM and start testing each game. Most games will launch normally once the prerequisites have been downloaded. These are usually Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables and possibly .NET as well. Now if after trying to launch a game, it crashes or gives an error message or any odd behaviour, then you need to verify it's game cache. This is done by right clicking the game, selecting properties, then go to the Local Files tab and click the Verify Integrity of Game Cache. This will take some time to complete, once done, it will hopefully find a file or files that need to be redownloaded and do so. After this is completed your game should launch. On very rare occasions, I've had games refuse to launch after doing this. In these cases, you need to uninstall the game and reinstall it. Just right click the game, select Delete Local Content which uninstalls the game. Then highlight the game (which should be greyed out now) and click the Install button. This will redownload the entire game and install it. This should resolve any issues you were having. Obviously you'll want to do this as a last resort as re-installing is going to take some time.

Lets just start with this, when you've sorted out STEAM, we can look at getting your User Files and Origin (if applicable) sorted out.