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Im getting a pc ready for arch. Im running dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1M to fill the drive with random data for and encrypted setup.
I'm 4 hours into a 80gb drive with no end in sight. Its a newer pc, 2.8 dual cores and sata whatnots.
Is there entropy issues using the live cd? Ive read that cat could be faster but i dont know where the bottleneck is. Has anyone else had this experience?
EDIT:nvm, i installed and used dcfldd from the live cd for a progress report and its running alot faster. Maybe its a bug in dd on the live cd.
Last edited by zippy (2010-01-11 05:53:31)
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/dev/random is really slow because it only provides "true" randomness which is not really easy to gather on a PC.
For things like dd'ing a whole disk you should use /dev/urandom. That's not really "true" random but it's way faster and should be random enaugh.
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I am using urandom as i said above and the title states.
Anyways, dcfldd is averaging 8mb per second. Im doing a 200gb now and its gonna take around 10 hours. I guess if i just let dd finish on my first post it would have been done soon, i just didnt have a progress report to gauge the speed. Apparently this is just how long it takes, i was just disappointed with the results.
Last edited by zippy (2010-01-11 17:42:25)
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