Software 'enhancements' vs hardware upgrades: questions

[Bryan Ericson]

Recently, I've seen such software products as d-time10 (uses hard
drive cache to boost CD-ROM access rates) and SoftRAM (compresses
RAM like stacker compresses hard drive (I think ;-)), among others.
Also, these products seem to be much cheaper than the hardware they
enhance. Naturally, I'm a bit suspicious. Is it worth it to invest
in these, given the low cost compared to what I would pay for an
actual hardware upgrade? I'm using a demo of d-time10, and it really
does reduce access times, but I don't think they've been reduced by
over 600% like the manual claims. So they do work. But still, I
wonder if such 'enhancements' would get rid of the need for a 4x
CD drive. Same goes for SoftRAM. Is it worth it?

Bry