One of the ways to speed up Google Chrome is to relocate its cache to a different drive. To make the most out of it, you can transfer the cache to a RAM Drive, a virtual disk drive made out of the memory you have on your computer. If you have more than 8GB RAM installed your computer, you should try this to maximize your Chrome performance.
So let’s dive in to find how to set it up.
Installing RAM Disk
RAM Disk for Windows is a free high-performance RAM disk application that lets you have a disk on your computer entirely stored in its memory. Download the tool from SoftPerfect website and install it on your computer.
Setting up the virtual RAM drive
Open up the RAM Disk tool, click the green “+” button, specify the size of the RAM drive, assign a drive letter, select the file system, and type in folder names that will be created in the virtual drive automatically every time it gets mounted. If you have multiple Chrome profiles you use on the computer, type in one name for each profile.
Click OK; a drive will show up in File Explorer with these folders available in there.
Relocating Chrome cache
1. Close Chrome completely.
2. Open a Command Prompt window.
3. Run the following command to delete the Cache folder in your default profile, which usually is the first one your created after you installed the Chrome the first time.
rd /s "%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache"
If you have more than one profile in your Chrome, change the Default folder to “Profile 1” for the second profile, and “Profile 2” for the third.
4. Make a symbolic link to the folder in the RAM Drive.
mklink /j "%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache" F:\Default
Again, replace “Default’ with “Profile 1” for the second profile and “Profile 2” for the third, so on so forth.
You will see the Cache folder icon with a little arrow on it, indicating it’s a symbolic link folder.
5. Restart Chrome. And you are all set.
Bonus tip
Content in this type of RAM Disk will get cleaned out whenever the computer reboots. If you don’t want to keep your cache for a longer period of time, you can create a RAM Disk with an image associated with so that the content can be preserved in the image during the reboot.