This is more of an update to my Fun with RAMDisks post made nearly a year ago.  With the alpha testing for the upcoming Media Browser Firestorm release going in full swing, I thought I would post a small update that makes this useful (for those of you with little RAM also).

Firestorm will include some experimental SQLite support for some cache-able items, like metadata (no image caching yet, however).  What makes this interesting for those of you with limited memory, is that the database for even my collection (2500+ movies and around 10000 TV episodes) is only about 40MB.  This means you can create a RAMDisk of 50-100MB and still have room to grow.

DataRAM has a new RAMDisk beta release available for Vista and Windows 7 (thanks Jason) here.  It is good for both x86 and x64 systems.  I set mine up to autoload and autosave my disk image on startup/shutdown and also to autosave every 5 minutes.  I chose to create an unformatted disk and then initialized it in the Disk Management Console and formatted it NTFS (DataRAM only gives FAT16/32 options).

I then cut and pasted the cache.db file located in C:\Programdata\MediaBrowser\Cache to my new RAMDrive (R:\, in my case).  This file is created after you enable <EnableExperimentaSqliteSupport> to True in the new Firestorm MediaBrowserXml.config file and then allow Media Browser to run and populate the database with the cached info (can take a while, but it is still very fast).  You will also notice a cache.db-journal file is created.  Don’t bother trying to symlink this file as it will not work.  It is a volatile journal file that SQLite uses and it will just delete and recreate itself over-and-over, removing any symlink attempt.

Next, you want to create your symlink by running the mklink command from the command-line.  I would recommend entering the command interface as Administrator to avoid any ‘gotchas’.  Once open, just run the following commands, assuming your RAMDrive is R:\ and you have already created and moved your cache databases to that drive.

mklink c:\programdata\mediabrowser\cache\cache.db r:\cache.db

That’s it and it should look like this…

Now it’s time to fire up Media Browser and enjoy some lightning fast SQLite/RAMDisk caching!

I do have to admit, however, that I can tell very little performance increase doing this on my system.  The SQLite caching by itself is tremendously faster than the hash files in the directory method, so your mileage may vary.