M17x R4 mSATA 64gb boot drive

Edit: Sorry Idk what happened to everything I typed.

Basically I just received my new alienware m17x r4 laptop in the mail today! It's amazing but I'm having a bit of an issue. I bought a 64gb mSATA boot drive and I find that only 21 out of 50 gb are available. I had heard that SSD and the like make loading faster whether it be screens and textures like in big sandbox games like GTA. Can I free any of this space up? or should I just leave it alone and put all my games on the HDD? I'm thinking about just upgrading to a large SSD (maybe 300-400gb? I know they can be expensive) but until then what do you recommend I do as far as gaming and their locations. And also applications like Steam.

Also this just seems like a huge pain as everything I do seems to be centered around this c drive which has such a limited amount of space on it. The music folder won't be able to hold all my music. This means I'll have to put it on the HDD but still when I click the music like from my libraries or the start menu it will bring me to the folder in the mSATA not my HDD. This just all seems so inconvenient. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do to best optimize this.

Thanks for all the help! and I'm sorry if some of my questions seemed blatantly obvious to some of you, I wouldn't say I'm a noob but I'm still learning a lot about computers. So thanks for educating me

 

I'm guessing the put the recover partition on there, you might have to dump that if you want. This is good to know.

But MegaSquishyman has the right plan. Get a 256gb ssd and leave the mSata drive for essentials. To me everything is essential and once you go SSD thats all you'll want.

 

if i were to optimize my memory with such a small boot drive i would put all my regular programs on it (chrome, itunes, dvd player, vlc, whatever) so they all load snappy...then install everything else to the other drive. the purpose of having the msata as a boot drive is to maintain snappy speed of the necessities of your computer. do not waste that precious 21 gigs with music...thats a sin. also...that 30ish gigs thats being taken up is windows...just in case you were wondering

 

click on start menu and right click music and go to properties and hit add folder. will allow you to keep all your music on your hdd but still access through music in your start menu. works same for pics, doc, ect.

 

I actually go to properties of each folder (docs, music, etc) within my c:\users folder and go to the location tab to change all of them to D drive.

 

By default, Windows allocates an outrageous amount of memory to the pagefile, proportional to your installed RAM. That virtual memory is implemented by dedicating disk space on the boot drive unless relocated. You can reclaim a large portion by setting the pagefile (virtual memory) to 1024KB or 2048KB max. That's probably what is responsible for a large portion of your mSATA drive's missing space. (Start>Computer>System Properties>Advanced Settings>Under Performance section, select Settings>Advanced Tab>Under Virtual Memory, click Change>Select c: drive, then Custom Size and enter 2048 in each box, then Set, OK and out)