Please explain a simple way to set up a D drive for documents

Hazel123 · Oct 7, 2025

Hazel123 said:
Quick question. If I have upgraded to 32gb ram and restore an image that was made when I only had 16gb ram - will it matter ? Trying to get my head round it!

It was a noddy question and very late last night and I should stop reading Google AI

Every time you google something, the first thing that pops up is the AI telling you a load of stuff that turns out to be wrong - and making you second guess yourself. Logically I know it isn't an issue but Google AI started talking about system instability and reinstalling blah blah.

On another note, I am thinking a Sata Drive really might not cut it. It's fine, it's quite zippy, but certain things I get hanging and that little blue circle. Mostly when opening Windows settings which are then slow to load. Everything else works, but Windows itself doesn't seem to like it. Although I think that only happened after the last update. So as well as hardware and installing, I have Windows glitches to deal with as well.

32gb ram didn't make a lot of difference to that although it is noticeably quicker generally. I had intended the ram upgrade anyway for the main computer. I do do some video editing. I was also hoping it might compensate a bit for the sata drive ........but. It will do for now.

Hazel123 · Oct 7, 2025

Slightly off topic, but on my new install,. Windows is showing an external hard drive as a local drive - which is odd.

TraderGary · Oct 7, 2025

Hazel123 said:
Slightly off topic, but on my new install,. Windows is showing an external hard drive as a local drive - which is odd.

Drives can be local drives, networked drives, cloud drives, or virtual drives.
So, your external hard drive should be classified as a local drive.

Scannerman · Oct 7, 2025

Hazel123 said:
It was a noddy question and very late last night and I should stop reading Google AI Every time you google something, the first thing that pops up is the AI telling you a load of stuff that turns out to be wrong - and making you second guess yourself. Logically I know it isn't an issue but Google AI started talking about system instability and reinstalling blah blah.

On another note, I am thinking a Sata Drive really might not cut it. It's fine, it's quite zippy, but certain things I get hanging and that little blue circle. Mostly when opening Windows settings which are then slow to load. Everything else works, but Windows itself doesn't seem to like it. Although I think that only happened after the last update. So as well as hardware and installing, I have Windows glitches to deal with as well.

32gb ram didn't make a lot of difference to that although it is noticeably quicker generally. I had intended the ram upgrade anyway for the main computer. I do do some video editing. I was also hoping it might compensate a bit for the sata drive ........but. It will do for now.

Hopefully the RAM will be transferable. You should be okay doing some video editing with an i5 CPU but if you plan on doing anything extensive an i7 or i9 is better. Also your processing speed will be a factor. There are i5 CPUs that are slower than molasses in January because they run at lower frequencies. As a rule, 16 GB of RAM is adequate for most i5 CPUs and you may even discover after removing that extra 16 GB of RAM that your PC will actually run a bit snappier in some cases. This has to do with latency, which is something I briefly touched on with respect to bottle necking. This is also why people who do a lot of overclocking prefer 16GB of RAM. Using more generally involves using more channels of memory which increases the work load on the CPU as it moves from channel-to-channel, slowing overall performance. The less cores you have the more pronounced this effect will be. So yes, there is such a thing as having too much RAM.

More RAM will compensate somewhat with standard SATA but only to a degree. NVMe, on the other hand, will speed things up considerably under most circumstances. The caveat here is that your PC can actually use NVMe. Often people will say that they "see" no difference when they switch to NVMe because they are trusting their eyeballs. The real difference is in actual real time data transfers. How long it takes to transfer large amounts of data is a good acid test. There is software such as Crystal Disk that makes it easy to test how fast your system transfers files. With video editing having a quality graphics card will also make a significant difference.

Myself, I despise AI. In my opinion things like Co-Pilot and GOOGLE, and Chat GPT are ruining the internet. Most of what I type here, in this forum, is based on personal experience and education that I acquired myself without the help of these highly manipulative programs.

Scannerman · Oct 7, 2025

Hazel123 said:
Slightly off topic, but on my new install,. Windows is showing an external hard drive as a local drive - which is odd.

Things can get even more interesting when you convert your RAM into a drive. This is called a RAM Drive and it can run even faster than NVMe. The drawback is that it is temporary. When you restart your PC everything in it is dumped because of the volatile memory thing. So essentially, it is a local virtual drive. *Coupling this with NVMe can produce interesting results:

Hazel123 · Oct 7, 2025

TraderGary said:
Drives can be local drives, networked drives, cloud drives, or virtual drives.
So, your external hard drive should be classified as a local drive.

Thanks. My other external drive just shows up as the drive name. This one shows up as "local drive" - possibly because it's in an nvme external casing?

Hazel123 · Oct 7, 2025

Scannerman said:
Hopefully the RAM will be transferable. You should be okay doing some video editing with an i5 CPU but if you plan on doing anything extensive an i7 or i9 is better. Also your processing speed will be a factor. There are i5 CPUs that are slower than molasses in January because they run at lower frequencies. As a rule, 16 GB of RAM is adequate for most i5 CPUs and you may even discover after removing that extra 16 GB of RAM that your PC will actually run a bit snappier in some cases. This has to do with latency, which is something I briefly touched on with respect to bottle necking. This is also why people who do a lot of overclocking prefer 16GB of RAM. Using more generally involves using more channels of memory which increases the work load on the CPU as it moves from channel-to-channel, slowing overall performance. The less cores you have the more pronounced this effect will be. So yes, there is such a thing as having too much RAM.

More RAM will compensate somewhat with standard SATA but only to a degree. NVMe, on the other hand, will speed things up considerably under most circumstances. The caveat here is that your PC can actually use NVMe. Often people will say that they "see" no difference when they switch to NVMe because they are trusting their eyeballs. The real difference is in actual real time data transfers. How long it takes to transfer large amounts of data is a good acid test. There is software such as Crystal Disk that makes it easy to test how fast your system transfers files. With video editing having a quality graphics card will also make a significant difference.

Myself, I despise AI. In my opinion things like Co-Pilot and GOOGLE, and Chat GPT are ruining the internet. Most of what I type here, in this forum, is based on personal experience and education that I acquired myself without the help of these highly manipulative programs.

Thank you. I've been using a near identical machine on i5 with 16gb ram for the bits of video editing I do for a few years and not had any issues. It's an i5 1035g1 - nothing special. The idea of ram as a drive is interesting! So are you saying I could convert some of my excess ram into a drive?

Scannerman · Oct 7, 2025

Hazel123 said:
Thank you. I've been using a near identical machine on i5 with 16gb ram for the bits of video editing I do for a few years and not had any issues. It's an i5 1035g1 - nothing special. The idea of ram as a drive is interesting! So are you saying I could convert some of my excess ram into a drive?

Yes, it can be converted into a virtual drive. Ideally, it is advisable that you have at least 32 GB of RAM to spare for this but it can be done with less RAM. I've never done it on a laptop but I've played around with it on a number of desk tops. RAM drives have been around for a long time. Here's an old video that explains it a bit:

The above video is entertaining but here is a more recent article that explains it much better:

What is RAM Disk? Benefits and Drawbacks of RAM Drive

We always say I have to delete some data from my SSD because it has filled up. We never say that to our RAM. We surely use the "RAM Cleaners," but never get

storedbits.com

Hazel123 · Oct 8, 2025

That is really interesting - I read quite a bit about it. Thank you. At the moment I’m just getting my system reinstalled.

And am starting to get obsessed with a small blue spinning circle! I was blaming the fact it was a sata drive as it didn’t do that on the nvme I’m sure. Particularly noticeable when opening settings - a fa blue spinning circle at the top for a second or two.

So last night I decided to try a clean install of Windows 11 on the sata drive (previously I had installed windows 10 and then upgraded to Windows 11 as this machine always seemed more stable that way.). Surprisingly the clean install of 25H2 went quite well and everything was much faster (the new ram is particularly noticeable). But the blue spinning circle was still there - it was just gone a bit quicker as everything was faster. When opening settings (at the top) or opening some other programs.

I still suspected the sata drive but to check I clean installed on my identical machine (spare) which has an nvme - and it was exactly the same.

So I began to suspect 25H2.

Because of that I went back to the original machine and reinstalled my image of 24H2 to the small nvme drive as I am certain I didn’t have this before. And it’s still there.

Only very briefly when opening settings at the top or occasionally when clicking to open something.

It’s starting to drive me a bit insane. I am sure I didn’t have it before!

I did DISM and sfc/scannow on both machines and all three installs and no issues.

Hazel123 · Oct 8, 2025

It happens on all my computers so I assume it’s always been there and I didn’t notice.

TraderGary · Oct 8, 2025

As Microsoft updates their operating system over the years they have used all sorts of different progress bars and spinning circles to indicate that something is happening and to wait for it to finish. You're just noticing the newest one.

Please explain a simple way to set up a D drive for documents

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