> Is there any faster and reliable way to checksum > whole paritions (not on "per file" base)???
It depends on where your bottleneck is... If you're cpu-bound you can try with a faster hash: md5sum or even md4sum would be a good choice (collision resistance is irrelevant in this application). On the other hand, if you're limited by disk throughput (which is most likely) there is not much you can do. After all, you have to read the data in order to hash it, and that takes time. andrea