64 GB mSATA for Caching vs OS?

I've just finished doing a clean Windows 7 install on my 1-day old Alienware 14. I've installed win7 to the SSD and using the HDD for data and everything else. Although, I'm not sure that's actually better in the long run based on my usage.

Part 1: Disk free/used size
After the install was done, drivers, etc. and some necessary programs like Firefox, I saw that my SSD only had 16 GB (out of 60) free. Quite surprising coz I've only done the base install + a few packages. So the first thing I did was disable Hibernation. I will rarely ever use it and it's a 75% of RAM file, so 12 GB. It cannot be 'moved' to another drive so I decided to just disable it from the command line which also deletes the file. Next up on my list was the pagefile. At 16 GB of RAM, I seriously doubt there should be any paging happening. So I've set it to be manually managed, with minimum 800 MB (windows didn't let me set it to 512, it's also used for crash dumps) and max at 8196 MB. I'll occasionally check if it's grown too much and if I'm running out of space. With those two changes, and a few MB saved in the disk cleanup, I now have 40 GB free. That's more like what I would have expected. Btw, I've moved and mapped the Users folder to the HDD.

Part 2: Performance
The lappy came with windows 8, which I plan to avoid for as long as possible. The stock install did boot very fast, like the 10 seconds someone mentioned in another post. My win7 install takes about 15-20, maybe because there's no fastboot? My hope was to keep all programs, OS stuff on the SSD like many ppl do. But considering that the data files/documents which those programs are accessing are still going to come from the HDD, I have my doubts about how practical this is. If Steam were installed on C: with the OS but the game files were on D:, I'm not saving much time by having steam open a few seconds faster with every game loading slower from the HDD. I suppose if I was playing the same game over and over again, and used the caching method, I'd probably have several of the game files loading faster and see a more realistic/valid improvement.

I use VMware almost daily and if some of VMs' virtual disks were getting cached, then it would really help, but not all 70-100 GB of them!

I'm going to wait a week to decide if I re-install and use the SSD as a caching drive rather than as the OS dive. In any case, I expect most of the OS files would be getting cached in the SSD over time giving the performance boost where it counts.

Thoughts?

Are there any filesize limitations on which frequently accessed files get cached?

 

Once steam is loaded, all programs will perform like having a mech HDD.

It depends if caching suits your usage pattern.

 

lol, why do you say that? Was using steam/game loads just as an example.

Yes, I'm trying to determine that.
But would there be any file size limits on what gets cached? So if the Intel RST program determined that my 30 GB vmdk was a frequently accessed file, would it still cache that or does it have controls like "that file is way too big to bother caching"?