Secure Firefox Cache with a Ramdisk

This is a quick useful tip that I found at the Ghacks Technology News website. Instead of using a hard drive to store the Firefox cache users could use a Ramdisk instead to speed things up and increase security at the same time. The two benefits of a Ramdisk are that its data will not be recoverable by normal means after rebooting or shutting down the computer and that it allows faster read and write processes because those are stored in RAM and not on the hard drive.

You need a software to create the Ramdisk, one amongst many is Ramdisk.sys which can be extracted to any location on your hard drive. You have to initialize the Ramdisk by clicking on Install Ramdisk. Select a size of RAM that you want to use for it afterwards (I suggest 25-50%) and pick a drive letter for it. The Ramdisk will be available after clicking on OK.

Fire up Firefox and use about:config in the address bar to open the Firefox configuration. Filter for the value browser.cache.disk.parent_directory, if it is not found create it by right-clicking and selecting New > String. The value has to be the path to the Ramdisk in the form drive letter:\\folder.

My Ramdisk has been installed as drive letter Z: and I have a temp folder in there called temp. My path looks like z:\\temp\\ therefor.