Is the HP image recovery partition necessary?

Hey everyone.

I currenty have an HP ENVY TouchSmart M7-J020DX which came with Windows 8 back in 2014 but has since been upgraded to 10. I've managed to keep it fairly clean so it runs well but the hard drive has always been sub par and I want to upgrade to an SSD. In preparation, I want to clean up some space on my drive and I'm curious about the RECOVERY (D:) that is 25gb of space on my drive. My understanding is that this is partition is used to restore the laptop back to factory settings which seems unnecessary since the 10 upgrade. Since windows itself already keeps a significantly smaller recovery partition and I have a boot disk made, Is the 25gb recovery drive necessary? If I delete it, will I be loosing anything critical that isn't covered in the windows recovery partition?

I also have so many questions about actually cloning a drive as well but I don't even know where to start with that. Crucial's ACRONIS software said the clone failed and I have no idea why. Any help in that direction would be a great help as well.

Thanks.