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RAM disk is slow or shows "process cannot access the file" error

If your RAM disk takes a long time to mount, unmount, save to an image, or shows a message saying "Win32 error code = 32. The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process", this can be caused by one of the following:

Antivirus or security products

There may be another process (usually antivirus) that attempts to open the file at the same time. It is a common issue with antivirus products when they try to check for viruses in any file that is being written to a disk. To fix this issue, open your antivirus/security product settings and exclude the RAM disk image file location from the paths that are monitored and inspected.

Windows hybrid boot

Windows 10 in its default configuration uses a so-called hybrid boot, which causes Windows to save all allocated kernel memory to the hard drive and reload it on the next boot. It does so between shutdowns, but not between reboots. This leads to another undesirable effect where even a volatile RAM disk retains its contents between shutdowns.

We recommend disabling the hybrid boot to prevent its interference with the normal RAM disk operations. Open an elevated command prompt and type:

REG ADD "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power" /V HiberbootEnabled /T REG_DWORD /D 0 /F

Alternatively, if you don't hibernate your PC and want to save a few GBs of disk space, you can disable hibernation. This will permanently deactivate the hybrid boot as well. For that, in an elevated command prompt type:

powercfg /h off

Logon-time disk

Unless you have a specific reason to use a logon-time disk, we recommend using a boot-time disk instead. Boot-time disks are mounted during system boot and unmounted on shutdown.