RAM Disk on Windows 11

There are very good reasons to have a RAM disk now with SSD drives. RAM is great, it doesn't really wear, it's only "flaw" is that it loses data when power is lost. SSD drives have finite maximum writes.

Of course, there's all kinds of optimization so theoretically it should take the "typical" user a very long time to reach the write limits. But if you're working with a lot of data or there's constant writing going on that's not good for an SSD.

I've read 300 to 1000 write cycle limitations per cell or triple cell. For that matter, why not forget trapping electrons or UV erasable ROM and go back to permanent write-once ROM that burns tiny fuses and just makes it 300 times the target capacity? If it could be done fast enough that would be great and a bonus is that data will never be lost and have the same "write" limitations.

I feel uneasy thinking about paging files now. Many programs constantly write to the hard drive. I was shocked to find out how much Chrome was constantly writing due to their use of MySQL database. With modern databases like Snowflake, if you're not able to write directly to cloud data storage, Snowflake expects bulk data uploads to be done with a local file.

If I'm doing automation gathering a lot of data regularly to push into a snowflake database, I have to first write it to disk and then the Snowflake driver can upload it to its staging area to be copied into a table. No practical way to do it all in memory so that's a lot of wasteful temporary writes to the SSD.

I automate a lot of processes to gather data and I've often had needs to create temporary files on the local drive. You can't always practically do everything in memory because utilities and tools have typically been designed to read and write to files. Researching and sharing data between applications often has suggestions to write to files.

While pipes could have been a nice option they open up a can of worms with security tools and IT departments and any software I create to use named pipes often gets flagged as suspicious. The most simple solution to this is a RAM disk. Fast reading and writing temporary files with no worries of disk wear would be awesome. A RAM disk would be really great to have for automation.

It would be even better if it was just included in Windows so I wouldn't need to use a 3rd party tool that I have to explain to an IT security department. It's solved my problem with Chrome. Chrome had the most constant disk writes of any application, while it was idle. I'd leave my computer running for months with Chrome open and I can't imagine the extent of what has been written.

Using a RAM disk I took a minimal configuration for Chrome with all my passwords, cookies, and bookmarks, zipped it up and I just extracted that to the RAM disk and set up a Chrome shortcut to use the ChromeData folder there. No more SSD disk writes from Chrome. I'd really like an integrated Microsoft RAM disk feature.

Maybe there's a way to have an option to periodically write its image to a real fixed-length storage file, only updating bytes that have changed and doing it far less frequently than what's going on now with programs using temporary files. Or even better, have it cloud drive synced so it's really not my problem.

Hello,

Thanks for all the information provided.
Please refrain from judging whether a ramdisk is a solution or not for one user or another: You simply cannot know and the question was not about what you think about a ramdisk, but how do make one...

As pointed out above, compilation is one of the possible use cases, which can profit from the use of a ramdisk, I totally agree and that is proven by the impact of the data rates to/from disk having high impact on overall compilation time.

I'd highly appreciate an official and stable solution for professional application.

Regards

PS: In a professional environment, for instance the investment for just 32GB supplementary RAM can financially be justified if it speeds up work a little and thus reduces delay / work hours.

I totally agree and that is proven by the impact of the data rates to/from disk having high impact on overall compilation time.

I agree, but you may use third party RAM disk software and this software is selling officially, isn't it?

I agree.

In my case I would use ffmpeg to compress video and store it in chunks for HLS stream transmission. If I create a continuous feed that is going 24/7 for days on end, the chunks will be written and overwritten so many times on my SSD that it will wear it out prematurely. Instead, on a Linux or MacOS system I would create and write to a RamDisk so as not to wear out the non-volatile storage of a disk drive. It also wouldn't chew up bandwidth on the interface for said storage drive.

So this is another legitimate use case and why Linux, BSD, MacOS, and others still provide the facility to have a RamDisk. It sounds like Microsoft is not providing this. ? If this is true then it is simply "sad".

German language

Was soll eigentlich inner die Behauptung, nimmt Speicher weg. Fahre auf meinem alten DualCore-Lappy Win7 32Bit und habe da 1 RamDisk von 700MB im nicht benutzen Speicherbereich unterhalb 3GB zum Swappen und Temp. Dort komme ich auf Traumwerte bis 3GB/s und oberhalb von 3GB noch eine 5GB RamDisk mit bis zu 2GB/s. Und wenn ich meinen grossen Rechner anwerfe, 2x Xeon je 10C/20T mit 16x16GB=256Gb, da fahre ich meine ganzen BTSen im Ram mit RamDisk, zumeist unter Linux. Und ich benutze schon seit 45 Jahre für Messlogging und Simulationen jeweils die Ramdisk. Es liegt also wohl an dem jeweiligen Betrachter, warum Er gerne eine RamDisk für Win11 nutzen möchte. Mfg BB

Translated to English language

What is actually supposed to be inside the claim, takes away memory. I drive on my old DualCore-Lappy Win7 32Bit and have 1 RamDisk of 700MB in the unused memory area below 3GB for swapping and temp. There I get dream values up to 3GB/s and above 3GB a 5GB RamDisk with up to 2GB/s. And when I start my big computer, 2x Xeon each 10C/20T with 16x16GB=256Gb, I run all my BTSes in Ram with RamDisk, mostly under Linux. And I've been using it for 45 years.

Moderator note < Translated to English language >