I'm not sure what point you make by saying "I did get hit with 2 Microsoft Win 10 updates and a Malicious software removal tool update shortly after the clone". That is normal and desirable updating of Windows. You could install Crucial Storage Executive, which has various functions to monitor and maintain your SSD such as facilitating firmware updates. You should update to latest firmware. Don't let your drive get more than about 80% full. Beyond that, both performance and lifespan will suffer. You could create unallocated space to act as overprovisioning, or enable overprovisioning in Crucial Storage Executive, which would prevent you from filling the drive too much and provide a performance and lifespan boost. That is quite an old system. If you have Windows 10 via an upgrade-in-place from a previous version of Windows, you might now consider performing a clean install. A clean install gets rid of a lot of accumulated garbage. Given that boot time has worsened, a clean install would be a good step.
I recently upgraded my E5540 to 12gb ram and 1000gb ssd (used Crucial's tool to select the memory and drive.). During  the clone I noticed the sshd showed up as RAID which made me wonder if there were other steps/considerations I should know about. In any event, I proceeded with the clone and replaced the sshd with the clone ssd.  With the excpetion of boot time and login (which have gotten annoyingly worse) there is a noticeable improvement in performance. Full disclosure, I did get hit with 2 Microsoft Win 10 updates and a Malicious software removal tool update shortly after the clone.Some specific questions when include:  Your suggestions / shared experience will be greatly appreciated
Special considerations/Best practice when upgrading from SSHD to SSD (Latitude 
E5540)?