[Soekris] Harddisk Slow

[Steven Finnegan]

Heinrich:

When using DD, it is important that you set the buffer size.  
Otherwise you end up transferring ONE sector at a time, which is very  
inefficient.

Note the difference in the timings below between using the default  
buffer size and a 1Mbyte buffer
(5.75 times the throughput!)

    [root at soekris2 /mnt]# time dd if=100m.dat of=/dev/null
    204800+0 records in
    204800+0 records out
    104857600 bytes transferred in 15.633779 secs (6707118 bytes/sec)
    1.283u 14.231s 0:15.64 99.1%    20+184k 0+0io 0pf+0w

    [root at soekris2 /mnt]# time dd if=100m.dat of=/dev/null bs=1024k
    100+0 records in
    100+0 records out
    104857600 bytes transferred in 2.718200 secs (38576117 bytes/sec)
    0.007u 2.715s 0:02.73 99.2%     20+2810k 0+0io 0pf+0w