Intel 310 mSATA Space Allocation Issues

Hello All... I've been a big fan of this site for a while now, and have learned a lot from it - thanks!

I just unboxed my new W520, and did a couple aftermarket upgrades (32GB memory; mSATA boot disk; and am awaiting 2 new SSDs).

The issue: I work at a university and used our Win7 Enterprise edition to do a clean OS install onto the Intel 310 80GB mSATA to make it my boot drive.

After installing the OS in 64bit mode (twice), it shows ~60+GB of the mSATA drive as used, with only ~11GB of space remaining available!

When I install the OS in 32bit mode, the mSATA behaves as expected - the OS takes about 15GB of space, and the rest of the drive is available for storage.

Any ideas what's going on? Obviously running in 32bit mode is not a solution! I'm at wit's end...

Thanks so much for any advice!

 

that is extremely odd, I have the same drive in the wife's laptop and have W7 64bit installed and don't have that problem. What if you leave your 32bit install and then upgrade it to 64bit?

 

Look in your root directory (C , you will ikely see a folder names "windows.old". When you install windows on a drive that already has windows on it without telling it format before installation your old installation of windows gets put in this folder just in case you need any files from your former installation. Deleting this folder will fully destroy all files from your previous installation and free up that space.

 

It's probably the hibernation and page file that are occupying that space. When Windows installs, it creates these files based on the amount of RAM you have. 32-bit Windows only sees 3.25 GB of RAM, so it will only create files of 3.25 GB each. 64-bit Windows sees all of your available 32 GB of RAM, so those files will be much much larger.

If you have a second hard drive, you can move the page file to it to free up that space. Unfortunately, you can only disable/delete the hibernation file; it can't be moved to a different drive.

 

Thanks everyone!

So far, after multiple OS installs and tweaks, the closest we've come (I've got the tech team at the university involved now), is disabling hibernation. That reclaimed ~35GB post-install. Still not what it should be, but better. However, not being able to hibernate the machine is not really a viable solution IMO.

This is proving to be rather frustrating to say the least. I simply want a viable mSATA boot disk running win7 in the W520, taking about the ~15-20GB of space the OS should require.

We've tried every flavor of win7 multiple times now. I doubt a different mSATA disk would help, though I could try another model than the Intel 310 I suppose... but that seemed to be the recommended drive on these forums, and no one else complains about this problem.

I'm still stumped.

EDIT: One of the guys just had an idea - what if we reinstall the original 4GB RAM chip, do the OS install, then swap in the 32GBs? Seems plausible...

 

Did you alter the size and location of the page file?


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did you check that there just isnt a bunch of unallocated space hanging out unformatted?

 

I pose this as a question, IF all else fails how about secure erase and start over??
32 GIG RAM WOW!!

 

A Windows X64 install uses a few more GB's than a X32 install. It also might be that X32 Windows won't create a 32GB page file.

 

Win32 read 3GB ram = 75%of 3 GB hibernation file + 8x% of 3Gb page file
Win64 read 32Gb ram = 75%of 32 GB hibernation file + 8x% of 32Gb page file

WOW 32GB?

Edit: Windows read your computer information every boot up so install with 4 probably wont help. You can trim down the size of pagefile but hibernation file? GOOGLE here i come ~~

http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-reduce-hibernate-file-size-in-windows-7/
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/E/7/7E7662CF-CBEA-470B-A97E-CE7CE0D98DC2/HiberFootprint.docx

If you must use hibernation.

 

After reading up a bit (thanks to saturnotaku's comments about hibernation and pagefiles), I have devised a strategy. It makes sense that the space is being lost to a combination of the pagefile.sys (that's by default created to be 1.5x's the size of installed RAM - really? these days? go figure), and the hiberfil.sys (which by default takes the same amount of space as the currently installed RAM - this at least makes sense since you'd want to write everything in RAM to disk when going into hibernate mode). Since I put in 32GB of RAM, well... you can do the math. Bye-bye storage space.

* Worth noting - I only have the mSATA drive currently in the machine, as I'm awaiting the arrival of the 2 SSDs I'll be putting in the main and CD/DVD bay.

So once I grab the machine back from campus, my new plan is to:

- put the original 4GB it shipped with back in
- install the OS with only 4GB RAM installed (why not?)
- get rid of hiberfil.sys
- set custom size pagefile.sys to a minimum size
- do select software installs
- upgrade RAM back to 32GB
- install new keyboard (they just don't make 'em like they used to
- have system-managed pagefile.sys on secondary disk (once it arrives)

So, just thought I'd share, and thanks again for the help! I'll let you know how it turns out... and let me know if you think I'm doing something stupid based on the bullet points above!

EDIT: Just read the other comments (Mr.Mischief and Baiii) posted as I was writing this - thanks, they help as well...

 

Solved. Pretty simple actually, in hindsight. It was exactly as saturnotaku thought, a combination of the hibernation file and the pagefile. All the OS reinstalls were entirely unnecessary. All I needed to do was disable hibernation and change the size of the pagefile. (sigh). Working like expected now.

Thanks again for the help.