On Thu, 1 Mar 2012, Olwe Bottorff wrote: > I'm trying to low-level a 100 gb drive. It's in an external caddy and > mounted on /dev/sdb. I ran this command: > > >sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb First, the bs= option Josh mentioned is great. Use that. Second, if you do a ps and find the PID for the dd process and send it a kill -USR1, it'll print out the current status. Third, and my favourite, install pv (you can apt-get it under ubuntu) and pipe the dd commands through it, like this: dd if=/dev/zero bs=1K | pv | dd of=/dev/sdb This will give you a progress indicator while dd is running. Note that if you're sudoing one of the dd commands, you may need to sudo the other, too. -Yaron --