32 GB SSD Cache Help

Hi, I bought the Pavillion dv6 a month or two ago, and it's been fine, but I'm still confused about the 32 GB drive that came with it. I think it's listed as "Recovery D:" and says it's a 21.5 GB drive, which makes sense after formatting and whatnot. It says 18.7 GB are used, but there are no visible files, besides something titled "recovery", which takes up no space. So are Windows system files already installed on it, so that I'm using the drive to the best of it's abilities?

And this question is more of a hypothetical, but am I able to use the 32 GB drive for games such as Skyrim and Starcraft 2 instead of Windows? My hope is that the 18 GB of data are recovery files that I can move to an external hard drive, and then use the SSD to speed up games that do a lot of loading.

 

the 21.5GB "Recovery D:" is a partition in your main (mechanical) hard drive. The mSSD is used as cache if you had it preinstalled. You can check it by opening Intel Rapid Storage Technology.

 

Awesome, do you or does anybody else know if I'm able to use 6-8 GBs for Skyrim to speed it up along with using the rest of the cache for Windows?

 

Well, one way is to disable your acceleration feature, reenable it and configure just 20/25gb (however much you need) to use as cache, then the remaining would be available for storage. But it's useful as a Windows drive if you're gonna use it for storage anyway; using the entire 32gb as cache for the system drive would, in essence, cache your whole system drive, no matter how many partitions you have within it. It'll variably cache those programs you use the most, making sure the files in the cache are those that you use often, i.e. the Windows system (Which I think may span up to 20gbs), startup programs, drivers, and, lastly, those games you always play.