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We currently use AR Soft RAM Disk on some Windows 2003 servers for storing short lived temporary files.

Looking forward to a move to 64-bit Windows Server 2008 I'm wondering what options there are for a RAM disk since it appears AR Soft RAM Disk was discontinued in 2005.

I'm not looking for any physical disk backing, just a pure RAM disk that appears like a normal drive to Windows.

Does anyone have any experience with RAM disks on Windows Server 2008, especially for 64-bit?

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    wouldn't it be better to have Windows manage memory for caching operations and just add a small SSD drive for fast file storage? Apr 2, 2010 at 3:13
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    Hardware adds another layer that can fail. Our applications are designed so that on server restart it expects all the files on this disk to go away so a physical disk is not needed or wanted. We've been running with a RAM disk for years so we know it works well for us.
    – thelsdj
    Apr 2, 2010 at 3:20
  • Voting to close: Requests for product, service, or learning material recommendations are off-topic because they attract low quality, opinionated and spam answers, and the answers become obsolete quickly. Instead, describe the business problem you are working on, the research you have done, and the steps taken so far to solve it.
    – TomTom
    May 14, 2022 at 14:53

1 Answer 1

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I have not tried it but ImDisk looks good.

Auto-mount explained in this answer.

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  • This does look good. The driver they made is signed by a key trusted by Microsoft so it would work on Windows Server 2008 without having to go into testsigning mode.
    – thelsdj
    May 24, 2011 at 18:23
  • I could not figure out how to make Windows Server 2008 auto-initialize the RAM disk with ImDisk. I tried everything--scheduling a startup task to run as Administrator, disabling UAC, and creating a system startup script group policy. I ended up going with memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk, which is free for up to 4GB ramdisks. Seems stable so far. May 28, 2011 at 1:18
  • I was able to create a RAM disk with imdisk -a -t vm -m z: -s 128M -p "/fs:fat /q /y" but I haven't yet tried making this run on boot. Will update when I do.
    – thelsdj
    Jun 1, 2011 at 6:46
  • I have verified that it works with automatic set-up on reboot in 64bit Windows Server 2008 R2. Full instructions in the linked answer
    – MattBianco
    May 20, 2014 at 11:08

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