Can I "cache" large RAW files imported from network drive on local drive?

Question

I've seen discussions similar to this topic, regarding "offline" editing, but not exact answers I'm looking for.
I'm copying RAW files from a shoot onto my network RAID drive in a per-album folder, from where I then import into a new LR catalog (I'm using LR 4.1) on my Windows laptop for that album.
I'm finding that editing RAW files on a network drive from a wireless laptop is awfully slow (not to mention not being able to continue the work offline somewhere else), so I'd like to cache those files on my speedy SSD drive just until I'm done editing and exporting/publishing that album.
I back up my per-album catalog onto the network folder alongside the RAW files since that's my IT-managed master repository. When I'm done editing, I'd purge the cached files and just keep the catalog previews on my limited capacity SSD.
So, is there a way to tell LR to, for one/all files imported from a location (in my case a network folder), look in an alternate location for the identical files? Since I create per-album catalogs in per-album folders, there wouldn't be filename clashing. Either LR can provide this caching behavior on its own or I'd manually copy files from the network folder to a local folder and tell LR to look there first.
I don't really want to make copies of files into secondary folders within LR since then it's a hassle to merge edits on the cached copy to its master copy (I haven't done this, but I'd imagine so).
Thanks for your workflow tips.
Erhhung

Answer 1

Have you tried locating your ACR Raw cache on this SSD drive, also ensuring that the size limit of this cache is large enough, to keep a goodly chunk of these Raw images all in play at the same time?
My understanding is that for performance reasons, LR will be caching your Raw data locally in any case - on conventional hard disk by default. And it will be doing so in an intermediate half-converted form (demosaiced into "sensor RGB space" but not translated into "picture RGB values" - the latter process varies depending on your live Develop adjustments).
So long as this cache has not run short, and reallocated space for something else, LR should (as far as I know) not be needing to go back to the network drive to re-fetch actual Raw content. And keeping that cache somewhere fast rather than somewhere slow, should improve responsiveness.
I imagine, though, that LR will continually check the availability and the unchanged timestamp of the real source file; and wouldn't let you carry on working from automatically cached data otherwise.