Clean install of Win 7 on SSD already having Win7

I had Windows 7 on a RAID 0 array using 2 x 150 Gig Raptors. Over the years and especially after the 7.1 upgrade it became much slower. In fact boot up took more than 3.5 minutes even with 24 Gig of RAM. I finally bought a 1 gig SSD and copied my C drive over to it. Boots up now in 36 seconds. However I think it would be much faster if I started from scratch and reinstalled everything which was in fact the plan. Unfortunately I just kept working with the new drive and adding more stuff for the last year so that the old RAID array is way out of date. I want to do a new install on another partition on the SSD without deleting it, reinstall everything and then delete the old install and partition on the SSD. Can I just make a new partition to the right of the C drive and continue from there and then delete the original C drive on the SSD or is there anything else I m]need to know? I may have even done this many years ago with older OS’s but I can’t recall for sure.

Hello. My windows 7 just stopped booting last week, I tried booting it up from an OS USB. It started but then it restarted. The setup didn't get past 1% before it rebooted. I went in the BIOS to see if anything changed but everything was set up by default. I even tried to reformat the hard drive and I'm unable to format any drive when i click on a partition. I can't even delete then to do a CLEAN install. My last hope is what I'm doing now and that's creating a system image from my windows 8.1 system, put it on the computer that's having the problems, when it's finally back up, I reformat the hard drive to windows 7 Pro, and update the entire system with new hardware. Is that a good route to go?