From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jan 12 09:48:43 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C0F2516A41F for ; Thu, 12 Jan 2006 09:48:43 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from kuku@www.kukulies.org) Received: from www.kukulies.org (www.kukulies.org [213.146.112.180]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E7CDF43D45 for ; Thu, 12 Jan 2006 09:48:40 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from kuku@www.kukulies.org) Received: from www.kukulies.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by www.kukulies.org (8.13.3/8.12.10) with ESMTP id k0C9mcmQ092896 for ; Thu, 12 Jan 2006 10:48:38 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from kuku@www.kukulies.org) Received: (from kuku@localhost) by www.kukulies.org (8.13.3/8.12.10/Submit) id k0C9mcqR092895 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Thu, 12 Jan 2006 10:48:38 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from kuku) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 10:48:38 +0100 (CET) From: Christoph Kukulies Message-Id: <200601120948.k0C9mcqR092895@www.kukulies.org> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Approved-At: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 12:47:56 +0000 Subject: increasing dd disk to disk transfer rate X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 09:48:43 -0000 My notebooks' hard disk, a Hitachi Travelstar 80 GB starts to develop read errors. I have FreeBSD and Win XP on that disk. Although FreeBSD ist still working , the errors in the Windows partition are causing Windows do ask for a filesystem check nearly everytime I reboot the computer. One time the error was in the hibernate.sys file, which impedes powering up quickly after a hibernate. Anyway, I decided to buy a second identical hard disk and tried to block by block copy the old disk to the new one using dd if=/dev/ad2 of=/dev/ad3 conv=noerror The process is running now since yesterday evening and it is at 53 MB at a transfer rate of about 1.1 MB/s. In case the the result being unusable I would like to find a way to make this copying faster. Any disk expert here? My motherboard is an ASUS P4S8X with an on board promise controller (currently not in use). System disk is on IDE1 and the two 80GB disks are master/slave on IDE2 bus. I wonder wether I could get better results (transfer rate) when attaching the disks to copy to the promise IDE bus. And another question: Is there a way to tweak the driver (be it the FreeBSD promise driver or the normal ata driver) to use more retries on errors so that I have the chance to copy everything or nearly everything of the already degrading hard disk? -- Chris Christoph P. U. Kukulies kuku_at_kukulies.org