32k for block size is the most efficient and fastest doing zeros to a drive. It will always take a fair amount of time regardless, as every sector gets written to on the drive. You can confirm your low level format by using hexedit or my favorite, wxHexeditor and look directly at the device path of the drive itself. I would also recommend a dd fork, dc3dd gives you live progress by the default (write speeds, time, etc), as well as default 32k bs (so you could use dc3dd wipe=<target> and away you go with progress and all). Good luck, -- Jeremy MountainJohnson Jeremy.MountainJohnson at gmail.com On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 10:05 PM, Florin Iucha <florin at iucha.net> wrote: > > On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 09:11:30PM -0600, Josh More wrote: > > You are on the right path. It will take quite some time to copy a stream > > of zeros to the drive. You can speed things up by setting blocks to match > > the block size that your drive uses. I'd start by adding bs=1024 to the > > line. Read the man page for units and other bs= options. > > The physical block size is 512 bytes (for older drives or 4096 bytes > for 'advanced format' drives properly configured). But using the > physical block size is still inefficient. I believe the sweet spot is > 16Kb or so (at least it was, several years ago). > > You can check on dd's progress by sending it the USR1 signal. > > Run first a ps ux | grep dd, find the pid then run 'kill -USR1 $pid'. > > Cheers, > florin > > -- > Beware of software written by optimists! > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >