On 2020-06-08 13:22, Matthew Campbell wrote:
I bought a new 4 terrabyte hard drive that is connected with a USB cable using
USB2. It took about 32 hours to read every sector on the drive to look for bad
sectors. I started blanking the sectors using /dev/zero last Friday night. It
still isn't done. Is there a way I can find out how much data a particular
process has written to the disk? I'm using Debian 10.4.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb ibs=4096 count=976754646
name=Matthew%20Campbell&email=trenix25%40pm.me
Install 'nmon'. Then start a terminal and run 'nmon'. Press 'd' to
display the disk monitoring screen. This will show read throughput,
write throughput, and percent utilization.
Alternatively, if you are using the Xfce desktop, add a Disk Performance
Monitor applet to the panel and configure it for the correct device node
/dev/sdX:
Device /dev/sdX
unchecked Label sdX
Update interval(s) 1.000
Monitor Busy time
checked Combine Read/Write data
Then hover your mouse pointer over the applet and it will show you read,
write, and total statistics for both throughput and for busy time.
USB 2.0 ports have a maximum write speed around 25 MB/s. eSATA ports
(version 1) get much closer to their theoretical maximum of 150 MB/s.
USB 3.0 beats them both. Of course, you must have a fast drive and a
fast program.
When using dd(1) to write blocks to a raw drive, use a block size of 1M
(e.g. 1 Mibabyte). As others have stated, a small block size of 4K will
significantly reduce throughput due to I/O overhead.
Also as others have stated, writing zeros to an SSD may wear it out
prematurely (depends upon internals of SSD). The best approach is to do
a "secure erase".
Rather than wiping storage devices with GNU/Linux userland tools, your
best bet is to use the manufacturer's diagnostic utility. In the ideal
case, the utility sends a command to the drive controller and everything
gets done internally at maximum speed. I prefer the bootable "Live"
tools, if available. Each manufacturer has their own toolkit. Get the
one for your drive brand. For example, SeaTools Bootable:
https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/
David
