As mentioned by Foxpup, that's utterly bizarre and not normal behavior. Write caching seems pretty far-fetched unless you have some type of alien hard drive from the future given we're talking 10GB+ of data for 12 weeks behind current.
I've actually seen a Windows machine use two-thirds of all available RAM for the disk cache, and it wasn't even working with huge files. I don't really understand why such a large cache is necessary for anything faster than a tape drive, but no doubt Microsoft knows what they're doing.
You thought it would be a good idea to put the blockchain on a RAMdisk.
That was my first thought too, but my second thought was that nobody using a RAMdisk is surprised that the data vanishes when the computer crashes. Though I've been wrong before.