On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 09:11:30PM -0600, Josh More wrote:
> You are on the right path.  It will take quite some time to copy a stream
> of zeros to the drive.  You can speed things up by setting blocks to match
> the block size that your drive uses.  I'd start by adding bs=1024 to the
> line.  Read the man page for units and other bs= options.

The physical block size is 512 bytes (for older drives or 4096 bytes
for 'advanced format' drives properly configured).  But using the
physical block size is still inefficient.  I believe the sweet spot is
16Kb or so (at least it was, several years ago).

You can check on dd's progress by sending it the USR1 signal.

Run first a ps ux | grep dd, find the pid then run 'kill -USR1 $pid'.

Cheers,
florin

-- 
Beware of software written by optimists!
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