What's the fastest way of writing 1s to a hard disk?

Question

I'm currently writing 1s to a file using the following:

tr '\0' '\377' < /dev/zero > /dev/sdb

But this is a really slow method when I want to fill a 500GB disk. Is there a quicker way?

This feels like an XY problem. What are you trying to accomplish? — Sobrique, Sep 16 '15 at 10:24
@Sobrique: I need the disk in a particular state for testing purposes. — Owen Pauling, Sep 16 '15 at 10:26
How fast is it running? Is dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M appreciably faster? (I know it's not the pattern you want, but that can be changed). — Mark Plotnick, Sep 16 '15 at 14:39

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 16 '15 at 15:29

0

It may be faster to create a reasonably-sized file full of one bits, say 1MB, with something like tr '\0' '\377' </dev/zero | dd of=allones bs=1M. Then you could write this repeatedly, e.g. while true; do cat allones; done >/dev/sdb.

answered Sep 16 '15 at 15:29

Tom Hunt

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What's the fastest way of writing 1s to a hard disk?

1 Answers1