Dex, nice research ! (-: A few comments: some details of what you found (and others commented on) may depend on the intelligence built into the on-board disk controller (re-mapping bad sectors, buffering I/O, ...)
- The default bs=512 matches a 'sector' (floppy disk, MBR) and also should remain for backward compatibility of older custom scripts (or custom scripts *should be* specific regarding defaults, (hmm, myself ...). - in case you are considering writing to the author of 'dd', please add this on my behalf: The reported transferred data should not just be 'n+1 records in/out' but 'n blocks + xyz bytes in/out' -- the prog knows 'xyx' (so that's easy to implement), and such output would provide the user with exact information w/o further doubts) - Horst On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Dexter Graphic wrote: > Purpose: > I wanted to find out what effect changing the block size (bs=) > option of the dd command would have on partition copy speeds. > I also wanted to confirm that the default block size (if no bs > option was specified) was indeed 512 bytes as someone had said. > > Procedure: > 1.) I used dd to completely fill up a 75MB partition with data > from a larger partition. > > /dev/hda1 = Debian 3.0 root, ext3 > /dev/hda3 = an empty, unformatted partition > command used = "dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hda3" > (Note: the above command stops copying and aborts once it has > used up all the available space on /dev/hda3.) > > 2.) I then copied this 75MB partition to an identical partition > on an identical drive using various block sizes and timing the > process. > > time dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/dev/hdb3 bs=xx > > Results: > > no bs= 78s 144584+0 records > bs=512 78s 144584+0 records > bs=1k 38s 72292+0 records > bs=2k 38s 36146+0 records > bs=4k 38s 18073+0 records > bs=5k 39s 14458+1 records > bs=50k 38s 1445+1 records > bs=500k 39s 144+1 records > bs=512k 39s 144+1 records > bs=1M 39s 72+1 records > bs=5M 39s 14+1 records > bs=10M 39s 7+1 records > > Conclusions: > > 1. The default block size if no bs= option is specified is > 512 bytes. > > 2. Any block size larger than the default (512 bytes) will > double the copy speed, but using larger block sizes will not > result in proportionately greater speed increases. > > 3. The output of dd shows the number of blocks (records) copied > plus (+) the number of partial blocks copied. From the above > results I recalled that my hda1 partition was initialized using > a 4k block size (which was the default block size in cfdisk). > > 4. The dd man page should be updated to include this basic > operational information (conclusions 1 thru 3) so that people > don't have to run their own tests to figure out how to use it. > > 5. The dd code should *probably* be updated so that 4k is the > default block size rather than 512 bytes (since this seems to > be the default block size on modern hard disks and it results > in doubling of the copy speed. > > Dexter Graphic > > _______________________________________________ > Eug-LUG mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug > _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug