Yes ...I've done this on many Pavilions (not your exact model) with no issues whatsoever. Yes put the ssd in the hd bay and the HDD in the caddy (as you say, the optical disk port is most likely Sata2).
"and it wont blindly cut power to it on shutdown " ... I have no idea what you are asking here, of course it will cut power on shutdown (but what does 'blindly' mean?)
I'm presuming you're going to clone from HDD to SSD. If there is one thing I've learned from doing this umpteen million times it's this .... never, ever boot up with multiple hard drives attached each having a bootable copy of win 10 ... you'll be amazed at how win10 will screw things up. Use an usb external HDD enclosure and connect it only after the laptop is booted up to do the cloning etc. If you need details re this, ask.