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The ability to try out bug fixes is a valuable part of the Hopper process and re-building images quickly is one of the easiest ways to improve your Hopper numbers. We recently went about trying to find the combination of build server parts that makes short work of our builds and wanted to share with the OEM community.

Step 1: Start with a fast quad-core computer with dual hard-drives. Doesn’t have to be the fastest processor group out there, but use something capable. Don’t worry about the size of the hard-drives.

Step 2: Buy two (2) 1-Terabyte SATA drives. The more expensive ones are rated for RAID, we went “on the cheap” and opted for the non-rated drives. You will also need to buy bay adapters and SATA cables for final connections. Hint: get the 90-degree angle connectors on the SATA cables.

Step 3: Connect the new drives per your manufacturer’s documentation. This step is intentionally vague since each build machine will have different configurations – please do you best. Enable SATA Raid in the Bios, reboot. Configure RAID-2 Array in BIOS, reboot. We found it best to stripe the two smaller drives as your C: drive and then stripe the 1TB drives as D:.

Step 4: Reload the OS making sure the OS is running from C. Install your Windows Mobile AK to the D: drive and build from there. Verify that all indexing programs are turned OFF. We have also seen some gains by pointing the TEMP directory to a RAMDRIVE.

Happy Building!

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