The HDD in question is purely just some programs and main storage. There is no system partition active on the disk. Can I just copy-paste everything in the HDD to the SSD and reassign drive letters, or must I actually clone partitions?
yes you can just copy them over
then goto administrative tool, computer components, remove the letter from the old drive, then reassign the same letter to the new drive
The HDD in question is purely just some programs and main storage. There is no system partition active on the disk. Can I just copy-paste everything in the HDD to the SSD and reassign drive letters, or must I actually clone partitions?
Yes you can just copy/paste.
Then, you have to swap around the drive letters so that the SSD ends up with the same drive letter as the HDD had originally.
yes you can just copy them over
then goto administrative tool, computer components, remove the letter from the old drive, then reassign the same letter to the new drive