However, after this quick success moving my browsers cache away from SSD turned out to be not the most trivial task due to a large number of different browsers and their very different approach to storing configuration settings. Here is my experience and instructions on how to do it in various browsers.

Internet Explorer:

IE offers the easiest and most convenient way to change a new folder for cache.

Tools – Internet Options – under ‘Browsing History’ section choose ‘Settings’
Click ‘Move folder…’ and provide the new location, e.g. d:\Temp\IE

Heads up: After providing a new temp folder and clicking OK to save new settings, IE/Windows forcefully closes current user session, and logs the user off.

Firefox:

In the URL type: about:config
Create a new string preference: browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
and specify a path to your cache folder, e.g.: d:\Temp\Firefox

Mozilla Zine: Browser.cache.disk.parent directory

Chrome:

The only way to change location of the cache folder is through the command prompt arguments:
C:\…\Application\chrome.exe –disk-cache-dir=”d:\Temp\Chrome” –disk-cache-size=75000000

Where –disk-cache-dir points to your custom cache folder, and –disk-cache-size specifies the maximum cache size in bytes.

Here is a full list of Chrome’s command line switcheshttp://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_switches.cc. Surprisingly, source code seems to be the only official documentation from Google.

Additionally, Chrome doesn’t expose that parameter in its configuration settings in a fashion similar to FireFox. If you navigate to about:flags in the Chrome, it provides some under the hood settings, but no cache configuration.

How to Turn On/ Disable GPU Hardware Acceleration on Google Chrome.

Opera:

Review the location of the current cache folder by typing in the URL: opera:about or from Menu – Help – About Opera.

To modify the settings type the URL: opera:config

Navigate to “User Prefs” tab and modify its cache folder: Cache Directory4 =d:\Temp\Opera\
(alternative quick jump link: opera:config#UserPrefs|CacheDirectory4)

Additionally you can modify temporary download folder for Opera as well, through another key:
Temporary Download Directory = d:\Temp\Opera

Opera’s Settings File Explained

Safari:

Safari unfortunately does not provide any way to change the location of its cache directory, just like it does not provide any way to change its advanced settings in a comprehensive way.

about URI scheme

Start command prompt and run diskpart.exe in command prompt issuing these commands as per illustration below:
d:\path>diskpart.exe
DISKPART> list disk
DISKPART> select disk x
DISKPART> clean

Please note, the reason for using ‘clean’ command instead of ‘delete volume’ is that ‘delete volume’ crashes diskpart utility when attempting to delete GTP/EFI partitions. Also outdated diskpar.exe utilitiy, which is frequently used for aligning physical partitions and is still quite popular for SSD optimization, cannot even read disk layout containing GTP or EFI partitions.

Great post: How to Delete GPT Partition or EFI from Mac Hard Disks In Vista or XP
Reference: A Description of the Diskpart Command-Line Utility
Diskpar & Diskpart in server environment: Disk Partitioning Offset
Disk partitioning Alignment: Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server
SSD Optimization guide: OCZ Technology Forum

The latest version of VMware Converter kept crashing on me at the start of the conversion process with the error: “Unable to create a VSS snapshot of the source volume(s).”
More disappointingly, even according to press releases VMware vCenter Converter – the latest and greatest version of VMware Converter, officially doesn’t support Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 editions (its latest version at the moment is 4.0.1 and dated 2009-12-08).

After a few failed attempts with VMware, I decided to look at Microsoft offerings. Even though, I couldn’t find an official Microsoft converter product, I found something better – a Sysinternals utility Disk2vhd, which can create a virtual hard disk (VHD) out of running physical image.

The most impressive part that the whole process of converting my running 60G RAID-0 hard drive array took only a couple of minutes, with minimal configuration effort – no heavy installation or complex user-interface interactions. All I had to do is select a check box with the volume(s), which needs to be converted and that’s it. Systinternals delivered an impressive utility once again! Kudos to Microsoft for keeping Sysinternals brand alive and bringing new useful tools.

Links:

• Sysinternals
• Mark Russinovich’s Blog
• Download Disk2vhd
• Run Disk2vhd from Live.Sysinternals.com