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! -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20120301/c8aad1de/attachment-0001.pgp>