On Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:11:27 +0000, Stroller wrote: > > Incidentally, if you want to use dd, adding bs=4096 speeds it up quite > > significantly. > > Thank you. I have always wondered what the optimal bs might be. > And why - could you possibly explain that, please? > > Is bs=4096 best for all disk-based operations?
Many filesystems are set up with 4K blocks, so matching this with dd is more efficient. The default is 512 byte blocks and anything larger than this is good, I sometimes use 40960 but that isn't significantly faster. I prefer to avoid using dd on hard disks altogether, it's just so damn slow for large amounts of data. -- Neil Bothwick You can't teach a new mouse old clicks.
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