Sworddragon wrote: > On Knoppix 9.1 with the Linux Kernel 5.10.10-64 x86_64 and GNU Coreutils > 8.32 I wanted to overwrite my USB Thumb Drive a few times with random data > via "dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=fsync". While it usually > takes ~2+ minutes to perform this action dd returned once after less than > 60 seconds which made me a bit curious.
I suggest another try using oflag=direct instead of conv=fsync. dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdb bs=1M oflag=direct Also with rates status. dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdb bs=1M oflag=direct status=progress Here is the documentation for it. ‘oflag=FLAG[,FLAG]...’ ‘direct’ Use direct I/O for data, avoiding the buffer cache. Note that the kernel may impose restrictions on read or write buffer sizes. For example, with an ext4 destination file system and a Linux-based kernel, using ‘oflag=direct’ will cause writes to fail with ‘EINVAL’ if the output buffer size is not a multiple of 512. Bob