To protect the security of files/data, I have always found it preferable to hide and/or set an access password for a partition rather than to encrypt the partition or an entire hard disk. The reasons are: 1) The performance and efficiency of reading/writing encrypted files are extremely low; 2) As far as I know, although an encrypted file is hard to crack, it is the most likely to happen and the most deadly for users to forget their encryption key - there is no solution at all; 3) In fact, even if you just hide one partition without password protection, few people would expect you to protect your private data in this way.

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is currently the best and most popular data (including texts, e-mails, files, directories, partitions, and whole disk) signing, encrypting, and decrypting program, developed by Phil Zimmermann in 1991. Its source code is open, and it has withstood the challenges from thousands of top hackers around the world. It turns out that PGP is still the most secure encryption software in the world for now (until the popularity of quantum computers, I think). Without a password, no one can decrypt the data encrypted with it!

First of all, you need to know that RAM has a maximum read/write speed of 100 times that of SSD and 200 times that of HDD. Therefore, when the physical memory is large enough, we can use some tools to create a virtual disk partition in the memory to specially store some frequently used programs and files (mainly temporary files generated by operating system or web browser), thus significantly improving the running speed of OS and software, and extending the service life of HDD and SSD.

Computer users who have a little extra money or are willing to cost input on hardware probably have installed and are running their operating systems on a solid-state drive (SSD), in order to gain a better PC performance and user experience. However, SSD has a fatal drawback - it can not write frequently, otherwise the disk life can be significantly shortened. As a result, virtualizing the physical memory as RAM disk became popular. Without exaggeration, RAM disk can be twice as fast as the top-of-the-line SSD and 10 times of the fastest HDD at least!

By modifying the environment variables of system or software to save a variety of commonly used temporary folders (Temp, IE Cache, Download folder, for example) to the virtual hard disk (RAM drive), we can effectively improve the file reading/writing speed and software running speed. And in fact, it can also reduce the reading/writing times of physical disk so as to prolong its service life to some extent.