I'd say do a reinstall still. Aside from time, a reinstall is almost always going to be the best option. It gives you a chance to clean off old crap, programs that don't matter anymore, and in general refresh your system. Apple, OWC, iFixIt, and the other players still all recommend reinstall + data transfer over direct migration.
With all due respect to posters and forum veterans, I've even seen magazine articles (Maximum PC) urging users to completely reinstall the OS every year. I decided long ago to depart from that option. It's not entirely a major chore to reinstall the OS, but you'll spend time gathering up drivers, reinstalling software, and other tedium.
When you do reinstall the OS, you will always find glitches and anomalies that show themselves in the Event logs, and it is time-consuming to track down the fixes for them. Every time I build a new system, I spend days -- perhaps a week or so -- cleaning up all that stuff, searching for the fixes on the MS and other web-sites and forums according to Event ID and other descriptors. So each reinstallation would lead you back into that repetitive mess, if it was ever a priority to you for being a practical perfectionist.
I have one system I built in 2011. It still has the original OS installation. Because it was handed down to another family member, I cleaned up the boot drive, uninstalling software as necessary, and tweaking to eliminate red-bang event-log errors. It's still running flawlessly.
I also don't see why you would need to worry about drives of different sizes in the matter of cloning your OS disk. After the effort I expended building my Skylake system, my familiarity with utility software that offers a cloning function expanded considerably. I'd simply download the Macrium Reflect Free, and use it to clone your disk. If I remember properly, it will clone the source volumes in their original sizes. If the target is a larger disk, you should be able to expand the system volume containing Windows without event or mishap.
I'd only worry as to whether your SSD target is properly aligned when you initialize it. And the utility software, like Macrium or EaseUS -- probably Acronis -- usually assures proper alignment.
Offering these words, I by no means criticize any other views of approaches. But these are the total of my experience in these matters, and I feel comfortable recommending them, or simply following them myself.
ALSO -- ALMOST FORGOT, but it was my first attention reading the OP. For SATA drives, and as a matter of Samsung versus Crucial, I'd simply pick the drive that offers the best capacity, performance in a ballpark range, and the best price. If that means the Crucial drive, get that one. I've had several of both manufactures in SATA SSDs. Certainly the Samsung drives were never problematic, but the Crucials never gave me any trouble. Most recently, I bought their 2TB MX300 model, and it's perfectly tip-top.
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