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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?

thelsdj
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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? – Bart Silverstrim Apr 02 '10 at 03:13
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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 02 '10 at 03:20
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1 Answers1

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I have not tried it but ImDisk looks good.

Auto-mount explained in this answer.

Community
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Jonathon Hill
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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 '11 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 http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk, which is free for up to 4GB ramdisks. Seems stable so far. – Jonathon Hill May 28 '11 at 01:18
  • 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 01 '11 at 06:46
  • I have verified that it works with automatic set-up on reboot in 64bit Windows Server 2008 R2. Full instructions in the [linked answer](http://serverfault.com/a/87763/50874) – MattBianco May 20 '14 at 11:08