On Monday 09 September 2002 18:58, Dave Mielke wrote: > It's necessary to specify bs= as the default is 1. Writing out 1 byte at a The man page doesn't say so, but the default blocksize is actually 512. I checked this by running some timing tests. To ensure it's fair, I popped the disk each time, used the same physical disk each time and the same source file. Finally I timed the cp command. Here are the results: [summer@numbat summer]$ time dd if=/var/ftp/pub/linux/RedHat/7.2/boot/bootnet-7.2.img of=/dev/fd0 2880+0 records in 2880+0 records out real 1m36.735s user 0m0.010s sys 0m0.050s [summer@numbat summer]$ time dd if=/var/ftp/pub/linux/RedHat/7.2/boot/bootnet-7.2.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 2880+0 records in 2880+0 records out real 1m36.597s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.040s [summer@numbat summer]$ time dd if=/var/ftp/pub/linux/RedHat/7.2/boot/bootnet-7.2.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=144k 10+0 records in 10+0 records out real 0m49.228s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.020s [summer@numbat summer]$ time dd if=/var/ftp/pub/linux/RedHat/7.2/boot/bootnet-7.2.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k 1+0 records in 1+0 records out real 0m48.830s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.020s [summer@numbat summer]$ time cp /var/ftp/pub/linux/RedHat/7.2/boot/bootnet-7.2.img /dev/fd0 real 0m49.259s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.010s [summer@numbat summer]$ -- Cheers John. Please, no off-list mail. You will fall foul of my spam treatment. Join the "Linux Support by Small Businesses" list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list