Original HDD...

As PC came with Windows, you can also put hdd back and create your own recovery usb drive from

control panel, recovery, create recovery drive, and select to copy system files.

TBH - this is somewhat redundant for windows 10 as you can easily install from scratch anyway.

Recovery partitions were important back in days of Windows 7, when you had preinstalled windows 7, and needed to use that to reset PC, unless you downloaded an iso, and often used the COA key on blue sticker on base of pc (which also often got lost).

The other reason was the recovery partition often contained drivers not in the standard MS isos (which you cannot now download directly from MS anyway). Windows 10 has much superior driver support, but occasionally the pcs (mainly tablets) have drivers preinstalled not in the standard MS iso, but you can usually download from the web.

What I do is export all third party drivers to a usb stick, using following, just in case you need them in future.

http://woshub.com/how-to-export-driv...indows-8-1-u1/

In all honesty, an OEM recovery partition on a Windows 10 drive must contain a massive amount of Dell bloatware which you probably do not need anyway.

So I would follow Jimbo's advice above, and forget about the whole thing, as you will save it anyway if you ever needed it.

Indeed after you have made backup, you can reclaim that space for your use.

Personally I would shrink OS drive and create a new partition for data as that makes data backup easier as you can back it up separately from C drive, using File History Backup (for example), and create smaller system image backups of C drive. You can also store image backups on new partition for convenience. You need need to copy externally as well in case hard drive fails - I do this less often just accepting I may need to reinstall a couple of things and update virus files etc if my main ssd fails)

Still that is your choice - you could simply expand the C drive as well, but over time image backups can get very large.