RAM Disk on Windows 11

Anonymous

Hi, I wanted to create a RAM disk on Windows 11. I found an article for Windows 7 and 10 which has been updated recently:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/create-a-ram-disk-drive-in-windows-7-and-windows/cd42aac4-8b0e-4b61-a2ea-9560a3e17d5b

However, when I tried it on Windows 11, it didn't seem to work properly.

After making changes to the TEMP and TMP environment variables as well as some application specific temp / cache paths to point them towards the RAM disk, everything appeared fine initially. But when running more intensive workloads, I experienced intermittent crashes and eventually a blue screen: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (probably related to the storage driver implementation used by ImDisk).

After reverting the changes I made to the temp / cache directories, removing the RAM disk, and uninstalling ImDisk, everything has been stable again.

My question is: Is there any way to set up a RAM Disk on Windows 11 without compromising system stability?

For my use case, I don't require persistent storage, but it should be auto-mounted on boot.

Thank you, Paul.

PS: Please ignore discussions regarding why someone might need such a setup; each person has their own unique use case which doesn't necessarily apply universally.

PPS: Revisiting this thread after nearly a year reveals that there is no official solution from Microsoft. While there may be paid options available, given the history of free solutions causing issues under load, I am hesitant to invest time and money checking each one individually.

In summary, there seems to be no official or unofficial (but endorsed) solution at present.

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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46 answers

Anonymous

2025-04-02T16:06:04+00:00

it looks like this is a tool that you have to set up the temp folder dive every reboot manually rather than making a ram-disk at boot automatically for temp stuff, so not exactly what I was looking for. There was an AMD thing when zen1 launched (Radeon RAMDisk) that worked for win10, however, I guess that has since been discontinued and doesn't work on 11 from what I have read. I don't recall what I used on win7 and that comp is now dead (edit, Dataram RAMDisk), hence me trying to get a ram-disk for temp files going on win11 (OBJ/texture conversion and 3D render temp file stuff).

I need a 4 to 8 GB NTFS RAM-disk that happens on boot to have temp files go to for other apps that I don't have to manually create and format every time I turn on the PC. PRIMO RAMdisk appears to do that, yet I'm not sure if the standard license has a "create drive automatically at boot" option like the middle tier. Also, it doesn't appear to have monthly fees (unlike Arsenal) just to set up a temp-drive, so even better. If your intent is VMs for testing programs then Arsenal may be the better option (so long as you don't need it to automatically create the drive at boot).

P.S. one of them RAM-disk programs had some note about disabling windows fast-boot to prevent conflicts, probably a good idea so programs are not trying to put temp files in a drive that hasn't been created yet.
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