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Date:      Fri, 7 Jul 2000 22:27:10 -0500 (CDT)
From:      "James A. Mutter" <jmutter@colltech.com>
To:        Emmanuel Gravel <egravel@earthlink.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Performance issues with dd
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.4.21.0007072225030.3752-100000@psasolar.private.psa.pencom.com>
In-Reply-To: <3966991C.7BB8086A@earthlink.net>

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  > As a backup measure, I'm using two hard drives of the same size,
  > but only mounting one, and I have a cron job that dd's one to 
  > the other every night. The drives are 18 GB U160 SCSI, on a
  > AHA-29160N. The whole process takes 45 minutes. A quick calc
  > tells me it should be finished at best in 2 minutes, at peak
  > rate. This is over a 20x difference.
  > 
  > Does anyone have any idea why it's taking so long? Is it just
  > dd that's the problem? The CPU is a PIII 650, and there's more
  > than enough memory to go, so I don't think the CPU would be
  > any kind of an impact here. Is there a better app out there
  > to do the job? I'm dumping one full raw device to the other,
  > not individual partitions. Could that be another problem?
  > 

Since you're duplicating an entire disk why not try RAID 0? It's
probably a better solution than "dd" and will keep you spare as current
as possible.

As far as "dd" goes, consider ditching it and using dump/restore, pax,
or tar.  You may not know it, but "dd" is duplicating the entire disk,
bad sectors and all.  

Good luck,
Jim



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