If what you're looking for is faster disk access (and it sounds like you are), setup a in-memory filesystem (for example, on a Solaris box, /tmp is usually just RAM, and files written to it are really being written straight to memory). Essentially, it's a poor man's memory cache, but it will make your file access a LOT faster, and you don't have to change anything except the path location. The OS will manage moving things out of memory and into swap as it needs to.