After setting up my media center PC and playing around with Windows Media Center and Media Browser, I was less than enthused with browsing performance. Figuring it was probably a disk problem with C:\Program Data\Media Browser, I looked into putting it on a RAM Disk. I found a free program over at Dataram's web site called RAMDisk. (The free version lets you create a disk up to 4GB. Higher than that costs $10.) Just to try things out, here's a benchmark showing side-by-side comparisons of my hard drive's speed to that of a 100MB RAM disk using CrystalDiskMark.
On my HTPC, I created a small RAM disk (200MB should be enough for me...I hope!) and moved C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser to it. Bring up the command console and create a hard link: mklink /J C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser F:\MediaBrowser. Then boot up WMC and try it out. Loading MediaBrowser seemed to be a bit faster, but the big speed increase came when I accessed my DVD collection. Normally, it takes a long time to load all of the genre icons (that are stored in the MediaBrowser\Images By Name\Genre directory), but now that they are stored on the RAM disk, they loaded instantly!
You can configure RAMDisk to load from and save to a disk image, so the information should be persistent. You can even have it save to disk at a regular interval. I've only been using this setup for a day, so I'm not sure how reliable this method is, but it seems to be working fairly well so far.
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