We introduce a measure of super weak noncompactness Γ defined for bounded linear operators and subsets in Banach spaces that allows to state and prove a characterization of the Banach spaces which are subspaces of a Hilbert generated space. The use of super weak compactness and Γ casts light on the structure of these Banach spaces and complements the work of Argyros, Fabian, Farmaki, Godefroy, Hájek, Montesinos, Troyanski and Zizler on this subject. A particular kind of relatively super weakly compact sets, namely uniformly weakly null sets, plays an important role and exhibits connections with Banach-Saks type properties.