----- Original Message -----
From: "Kris Kennaway" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Bill Moran" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Volker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[email protected]>; "Kris
Kennaway" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2007 6:50 PM
Subject: Re: getting garbage faster using FreeBSD?
On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 09:12:38AM -0500, Bill Moran wrote:
In response to Volker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On 02/19/07 20:51, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 08:40:37PM +0100, Volker wrote:
> >> The tape sits there since 48 hours writing a block of data every
> >> other minute and still didn't fill up the tape completely. The
> >> system this is running on is a P-4 3GHz machine using FreeSBIE 2.0
> >> (6.2-RELEASE based).
> >>
> >> I suspect this to be a slow /dev/random.
> >
> > This sounds odd to me, I get 18-20MB/sec sustained read performance
> > from /dev/random on this 2GHz system, which is probably faster than
> > your tape write speed.
>
> Hmm, so this might be the tape drive(r)? I'll check this out as soon
> as I'm going to write to hard disk.
>
> I'm going to make some tests with /dev/random to get the real speed.
Are you actually using /dev/random and not /dev/urandom?
/dev/random is "military grade" random data. It will block if it feels
that it hasn't gathered enough entropy to satisfy your request. It will
never provide random data at any reasonable speed, but it will provide
high-quality random data.
If you need lost of random data, use /dev/urandom, which provides data
that _may_ be predictable under some circumstances, but will provide
it at a decent rate of speed.
Not true in a post 4.x world, they are symlinks and both "military
grade" with non-blocking semantics.
Kris
I do a lot of data recovery contracting. What we do for the government tax
company is wipe their old tapes totally clean and unrecoverable for them.
We use a device called a degausser. It creates a very strong varying
magnetic field that totally wipes out everything on a tape. We've put a few
hard drives on it to test it out. it TOTALLY wipes out everything on the
drive include the bios sectors rendering the drive totally unusable. We
can't even get it back after that.
-Clay
PS: Don't use it wearing a watch unless you want to lose the time.
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