zeroing a disk with dd vs Disk Utility

Posted by jdizzle on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by jdizzle
Published on 2010-05-19T04:56:55Z Indexed on 2010/05/19 5:01 UTC
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I'm attempting to zero a disk on my Mac OS X machine. I'm going for complete zeros and unformatted, so I think of dd. Unfortunately the maximum throughput I've managed to get out of dd is 7MB/s. Just for grins I tried disk utility and it has a throughput of 19MB/s. What gives? I've tried changing the bs option on dd to all sorts of values, but it still hovers around 7MB/s. Why is disk utility so much faster?

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