On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:50:42 -0500 Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > > > dd should not use lots of CPU time. The bottleneck is disk access > > speed. Depending on the drivers used, and some tweaking, the system > > may be spending a lot of time in the disk driver routines doing > > basically nothing. > > CPU use will depend on your disk controller. IDE controllers have a lot > of CPU overhead for seeks/positioning even if DMA is used for the data > transfer - that's why people still use SCSI for busy servers. Thankfully no longer true as of SATA providing your controller does AHCI or similar and the drives support NCQ Alan
