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Date:      Thu, 12 Jan 2006 09:39:23 -0600
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To:        Christoph Kukulies <kuku@www.kukulies.org>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: increasing dd disk to disk transfer rate
Message-ID:  <20060112153919.GA21009@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <200601120948.k0C9mcqR092895@www.kukulies.org>
References:  <200601120948.k0C9mcqR092895@www.kukulies.org>

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In the last episode (Jan 12), Christoph Kukulies said:
> 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.

Everybody has mentioned the first obvious fix: raise your blocksize
from the default 512 bytes.  The second fix addresses the problem that
with a single dd, you are either reading or writing.  If you pipe the
first dd into a second one, it'll let you run at the max speed of the
slowest device.

dd if=/dev/ad2 conv=noerror,sync bs=64k | dd of=/dev/ad3 bs=64k
 
-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com



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