Purposed Cassandra 2.1 setup for unit tests?

I currently wonder what options do I have to configure Cassandra for unit testing.

Currently I just use a SSD drive and set the Cassandra directory differently and start the tests loading test scenarios. It is dead slow but I reuse the server and heal the scenarios (restore instead of delete and start over) but beside from that what else can I do?

I also pondered if I can create a ram drive and mount it just for those tests.

What options are useful in conjunction with tests without introducing functional differences that make acceptance tests worthless?

Is there an in-memory replacement like one replaces MySQL/PostgreSQL with H2 for unit testing?