How to move Google Chrome Cache to RAM Disk

- This reduces the wear and tear on your SSD

- Slight improvement in loading speed of webpages

1- Unpin Chrome from your taskbar as it doesn't have the edited shortcut line that we want

2- Just add the following to the Chrome shortcut in your start by right clicking on it, then choose properties and add the following to the end of the target (with that extra space you see at the beginning of the line):

Code:

 --disk-cache-dir="R:\Temporary Internet Files\Chrome"

The target will now look like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disk-cache-dir="R:\Temporary Internet Files\Chrome"

3- Right click on that shortcut in your start menu then choose Pin to taskbar

Now launch chrome and you will immediately see the temp cache folder created on your RAM Disk Drive

Note: Substitute the letter R with the drive letter of your RAM Disk Drive

 

There's not much positive difference in SSD load if you need to sync the RAM disk to storage. Depending on how you sync, it could be much worse.

If you don't, you lose the cache after reboot, which is a kinda big deal unless your browsing habit involves mostly heavy use of a few websites, and not much else.


And for the 234753rd time, SSD endurance does not matter for consumer workload. The benefit is just increased performance.

 

As of Mid-2016 most testing has been done on SLC Flash SSDs. Only a little on MLC and hardly any on TLC SSDs. We should expect about a factor of 20 decrease in endurance from SLC to TLC. This may really be a concern for consumers. The latest consumer drives use 16mn planar TLC w/ 3-5k P/E cycles! (vs. SLC:100k & MLC 10k)

To make matters worse, estimates of typical consumer traffic appear much lower than reality. I was seeing 0.5TB / week on a mostly idle system. That's > 70TB-writes in 3 years doing nothing. Actual P/E cycles may be much higher. What will happen if I start to use my PC?

Changing the browser cache & session store easily cut my total byte writes in half. It's too easy not to do.

 

Thanks for the feedback bro.

 

Many RAM disk software allows you to commit RAM disk data to HDD at reboot/shutdown, so during normal use there is no sync overhead.

 

But for browser cache use most of the data is media files (images and whatnot) which is usually downloaded only once. There's no overwriting, so sync at shutdown doesn't have much impact on total write. Frequent overwrites are small (configuration or history) and buffered by the OS's normal I/O cache anyway.

 

"There's no overwriting..." -- While the writes may be fewer than many people suspect, there are many scenarios where the files in the browser cache are refreshed that people don't suspect also. Examples (not comprehensive):

- cache size is set to a small value, so the cache hits the limit very fast, which forces overwrites
- files in the cache can get refreshed via various server headers (e.g., ETag, Cache-Control)
- files in the cache can get refreshed when you hit a cache buster in the URL (e.g., ?ver=2)
- user may manually clear the browser cache
- many people may have CCleaner jobs or equivalent scheduled, which wipes out the cache

I cannot speak for others because it depends on their system and habits, but here's the setup that I've been happy with the past couple years:

- my laptop has 24GB RAM, of which 2GB is set aside for the RAM disk (R
- I set browser caches, %TEMP%, %TMP%, and anything else that incurs a lot of expendable write operations to R: (e.g., log directories, Ultrasurf\tmp)
- I reboot my laptop a couple times a month (mostly whenever an update requires a reboot)
- R: is backed up to C: on shutdown and restored on restart (the backup is one contiguous file, which helps)
- I have a scheduled task that executes 'C:\Windows\System32\cleanmgr.exe /sagerun:1' once a week to clean up junk

With this setup my SDD light blinks noticeably less than before, which gives me a nice, warm feeling inside .