update,
picked up a 500g 860 evo ssd, used samsung software to clone my old ssd, the partitions are in a different order, reserved in front, uefi next, then os, old drive was uefi, then os, then recovery.
no other changes, just a drive swap, actually not mounted or anything, just took power and sata off the old ssd to new. i have a hot swap drive bay in the top of my case, so i used that for the clone. usb drives, printer, all that stuff still connected. used media creation tool, downloaded the latest 1909, disabled look for new stuff before install.
os updated perfect, zero issues.
so was it a partition order, something samsung software wrote differently, space (old drive had 25g free or so) ??? who knows.
I might pursue a 970 evo plus on a pci adapter, possibly more gains for the investment, although if the system updated, i would not be purchasing any new hardware.oh well.
i could clone the new updated drive, back to the old ssd, but this might be a sign to upgrade. my os drive was a old 840 samsung 128g , system has 5T+ of hdd storage, and 8tb network storage.
Update, : checked the drive again, it has 2 reserved, 1 in front, and 1 at the end of the drive. the end one was added with 1909 i think. ( performing drive image on the new drive after update)