SoftPerfect Ram Disk.

So I've been trying out SoftPerfect's Ram Disk software which was previously a commercial software but is now free and has some good reviews and performance benchmarks from online sites.

So far the software has been really good, I use it to cache Firefox, Chome and Internet Explorer's browser cache and there's a noticeable difference in browsing speed when loading sites the contain lots big images or flash videos.

I ran CrystalDiskMark on the allocated Ram Disk and was amazed by the speeds, currently I'm only using the Ram Disk (1GB allocated) for web browsing cache and have no plans to use it for anything else since I have a SSD for my OS and programs and by moving the web browsers cache to a Ram Disk not only speeds up my web browsing experience but also saves some disk write and space from my SSD and keeps my OS a bit more secure since the browsers cache is emptied at every restart/shutdown.

I recommend giving the software a try if your system has 8GB or more ram, it's very light on resources, easy to use, fast and best of all free.

 

I just tried ImDisk's Ram Disk and must say it's also an outstanding RamDisk software, it's a quite a bit slower than SoftPerfect's Ram Disk especially in the seq reads and writes however I find ImDisk to be much more stable (due to the driver being implemented at an IO level and digitally signed by Microsoft) and ImDisk is a bit lighter on resources.

The recommendations are the same for ImDisk IMHO a system with no less than 8GB ram is recommended, it's also freeware and has a pretty decent GUI Toolkit that can be downloaded as an all in one package which includes ImDisk.

 

In Firefox you can manually set it to use only RAM for caching.

- Type about:config into the Location Bar.
- Set these preferences to these values:
browser.cache.disk.enable to False
browser.cache.memory.enable to True

I don't know about other browsers though.