Can cloning a hard disk drive to a SSD drive physically damage the SSD or the performance of the SSD?

I have a new SSD drive, I want to use it to replace the old mechanical hard disk drive in a laptop.

The laptop had a new O/S (Windows 7 64-bit) installed about 9 months ago and I want to know if it's worth the effort to reinstall the O/S or if I can just clone the old HDD.

I have read discussions about differences between platter alignments in the HDD and memory/data pages in the SSD. I believe you can reconfigure the SSD to handle the problem of platter/page alignment, but even so the advice is coming down on the side of a reinstall because:

1. Cloning can cause a misconfigured SSD and thus not achieve the
   maximum performance boost I am looking for.


2. The misconfiguration is actually damaging to the SSD and will result in a reduced lifetime.

Is there quantified measure of the expected performance degradation for cloning (with or without reconfiguration)?

Is there a quantified measure of the any possible damage to the SSD and the reduction in its lifetime?