On Tue, 3 Sep 2013, David <[email protected]> wrote:
> That completes test #1. Next run a second test, with a bigger
> blocksize. In my experience larger than 4k gives no benefit so I use
> bs=4k. Again, for useful data you will need to change of=/dev/null to
> your actual disk, but you can do a practice run with of=/dev/null so
> long as you don't forget that the number you get is meaningless.

I've just done a test on a system with a 500G SATA disk where sda2 is near the 
start of the disk (sda1 is /boot).  In this case cat (which uses a buffer size 
of 64K) was slightly faster than dd with a 1MB block size.

For a casual user the amount of time spent typing and verifying the dd command 
line would probably be significant when compared to the <30s data transfer so 
cat would be a better option.

# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda2 bs=1024k
dd: error writing ‘/dev/sda2’: No space left on device
2049+0 records in
2048+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 29.4816 s, 72.8 MB/s

real    0m29.483s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m1.824s
# time cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda2
cat: write error: No space left on device

real    0m26.553s
user    0m0.016s
sys     0m1.448s

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