[ale] dd - how long should it take?

[Michael Still]

On Fri, 5 Mar 2004 2:38pm, J.M. Taylor wrote:
>
> Greetings ALErs
>
> Anybody ever been crazy/desperate enough to dd a 9gb SCSI disk?
> We've had a dd going on a Sun 450 for hours now.  dd as far as I know
> doesn't offer verbose, so it's just quietly sitting there.  *Something* 
> is
> happening between the disks b/c the little green lights are flickering 
> on
> them.
>
> This has 4 400Mhz processors (but during dd only one would be used,
> afaik).  No idea the amount of ram, except that it's over 1Gb.  We used 
> a
> 1024 block size..the disk we're dd'ing from is giving us some going-bad
> warnings so we don't want to access it too much for fear of it outright
> dying.  Any advice on how long this should take would be...calming. :)
>
If you have to run it again, I'd try with a bigger block size.  Just 
make sure its a multiple of 512bytes for best results. Also I remember 
using ufsdump | ufsrestore (not that exact command) on my ultra30 with 
2x7200rpm 9giggers that didn't take anywhere near 5 hours.
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Michael Still (MichaelStill at tmail.com)
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