YES, making a temporary ramdisk and using -datadir makes it sync much faster. This might not be an option for everyone, but for anyone using bitcoind on a heavy duty server, its a no-brainer.
This. I skipped the temporary part and just left the blockchain on ramdisk with backup to fixed disks. The good news is memory is cheap, insanely cheap these days. If you are looking at doing any serious bitcoin backend work $100 or $200 on memory increase is worth far more than upgrading any other component.