[mythtv-users] Clone MythTV HDD

[David Brodbeck]

Brian Wood wrote:
> On Tuesday 04 August 2009 15:57:51 David Brodbeck wrote:
>> Johnny wrote:
>>> This weekend I cloned a drive with dd:
>>>
>>> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
>>>
>>> It took about 4 hours to do a 250 GB drive.
>> It usually goes faster if you use a larger block size.  I like:
>>
>> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
>>
>> I think the default block size is only 512 bytes, which isn't nearly
>> large enough to get good performance out of most modern disks.
> 
> Remember that dd dates from the times of 1.4MB floppies, and a 20MB HDD was 
> gargantuan.

Yup.  Actually, I think the original application was copying 9-track 
reel-to-reel tapes, while optionally converting the data between EBCDIC 
and ASCII.  Ancient mainframe stuff. :)