dd time

[Michael Cohen]

Hi Ben,
  You should specify 64k blocks as well with bs=64k - it makes a huge
  difference due to optimised dma transfers.  Normally with modern hdd/hardware
  you should be able to pull between 40-60M per second if the disks are on
  seperate IDE channels or SATA. Older hard disks would go about 26-30Mb/s but
  that should be rare to find those these days.

  Also open up another terminal and do: killall -USR1 dd 

  This will cause dd to print out a progress indication of where its at and how
  fast its going.

  Hope this helps,
    Michael.

On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 10:28:56AM +1030, Ben Williams wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Long time ex-subscriber, first-time-in-a-while poster ;)
> 
> I've got a hard drive that has started to die - bad sectors - and before 
> it goes totally down, I'm using dd to copy it to a new drive. I've got 
> running on the box:
> 
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
> 
> It's a 160Gb source drive. Does anyone have any clues as to how long it 
> may take? I would guess it's just a question of read/write speeds on the 
> drives, but has anyone done something similar and can say "ooh, I reckon 
> about 8 hours, at a guess" or "ooh, I reckon about 8 days, at a guess"?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>  - Ben
> 
> -- 
> "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by 
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