Zeroing drives

[SilverJS]

Stupid question, but just confirm that FreeNAS shell supports the dd command? I've tried zeroing one of my drives and I've left the command there for almost 24 hours. The "%" doesn't appear, and the computer appears unresponsive, although I can still carry out all commands on the WebGUI.

I don't have a HDD LED working, so I don't know, but I couldn't really hear it anyways with all the other drives around...

Thanks!

 

[pauldonovan]

Yes, dd works file from a FreeNAS shell. But only a modified version of dd for Windows provides any ongoing progress - usually it just sits there blankly until it's finished, then reports how many records it changed.

How big is the drive, and what command have you used?

 

[SilverJS]

500 Gb. How long should that take? I used :

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada2

Will that work? Ada2 is my 500 Gb system drive - or rather, the one I was planning on using as a system drive for FreeBSD. I'll probably just stick with FreeNAS for now.

 

[matthewowen01]

500 GB, depends on the controller it's on and the disk. id's say a few hours hour and a half for good conditions (100 MB/s) and 7 hours for poor conditions (20 MB/s)

remember dd doesn't report anything until it's done, no % or any feedback.

 

[SilverJS]

OK - mine's been going on for 24 hours now. I think I might take the drive back...

 

[sjieke]

Did you specify the block size for the dd command? If not I don't know what the default is for the dd command, but if it is small you will get terrible performance.
I would try again by using a blocksize of 2048k or 4096k.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada2 bs=4096k