Do you have tons of extra RAM in your system? It has come down in price quite a bit so you could have much more than you need. How about using it in a virtual hard drive to make use of that extra hardware? A RAM drive will empty its contents when the computer restarts, which could be a desirable function. It will also be significantly faster than your traditional spinning-disk hard drive.
StarWind Software has a free product called StarWind RAM Disk. After you register for their site, you can download StarWind RAM Disk from their free products downloads.
After you download and install the application, you can launch the RAM Disk manager and create a drive to your specifications (and free RAM).
To Windows and your applications, this will look just like a typical hard drive.
With StarWind RAM Disk emulation these virtual drives can be more than 1000 times faster than your local hard drive. They appear to your system and applications as a standard disk volume where you can read and write files.
Using the RAM Disk, I noticed a consistent performance improvement. While it would be great for speedy database access or even better for a virtual computer, your use of the virtual drive must take into consideration that the drive is wiped every time the computer is restarted.
I am considering using the RAM Disk for my download directory. It would reduce writes to my SSD and most often you take action on downloads right away. You either run an executable, play a media file, or extract a compressed file. While being in RAM, all of these operations would be sped up. The fact that it empties with each reboot would also keep my download directory from accumulating old files as time goes by.