caching for flash disk access?

I recently tried using portableapps with a cheap 1GB flash disk. It is very slow - probably because I bought the cheapest flash disk I could find, not realising that the more expensive ones are faster.

The thing is, I'm using a PC with 2GB of RAM in it, most of which seems to be sitting empty most of the time. I'm wondering if there's some way of using the spare RAM as a read/write cache to speed up access to the flash disk.

Obviously the first time an app needs to read a file from the flash disk it will be slow, but if I could use a cache to store a copy of the file then the 2nd access should be very fast.

Similarly when writing files, it seems that apps block while they attempt to write to the flash disk. If they wrote to a RAM cache instead then the write could be almost instantaneous, and the cache could then write back to the flash disk in its own time while the app carried on doing its work.

Is such a feature available? Maybe it's already built into Windows and I just haven't found it. I remember that old version of Windows (like 3.1 maybe?) came with something called SMARTDrive (smartdrv.exe) which did exactly what I'm asking about here, and I kind of assumed that it had since been built into Windows, but maybe not.

Another benefit of using a cache would be that the flash disk would wear out less quickly, since the cache would reduce the number of reads and writes to the disk.

I thought I may have found a solution when I discovered SuperCache,
but that only seems to work with hard disks, not with flash disks.

Thanks for any pointers you can give me!

Chris.