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I set up dd to clone a smaller system 40.00GB hard drive (/dev/sda) to a new bigger 111.00GB one connected via a USB reader (dev/sdb) and Its been going for two hours now. The activity meter on the new hard drive shows it's doing something. But the CPU is only about 20%. When is this thing going to complete? Should I re-start the process?

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3 Answers 3

up vote 16 down vote accepted

In the future, you should use pv to get a running progress bar.

sudo apt-get install pv

With pv installed, let's assume you want to clone a 20GB drive, /dev/foo, to another drive (20GB or larger!), /dev/baz:

sudo dd if=/dev/foo bs=4M | pv -s 20G | sudo dd of=/dev/baz bs=4M

Important bits to notice: the bs=4M argument sets the blocksize for dd operations to 4MB, which drastically improves the speed of the whole thing. And the -s 20G argument tells pv how big this operation is expected to be, so it can give you an ETA as well as a current speed.

I love pv so hard it should probably be illegal.

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If course, pv is very useful, but if you are copying a lot of data it adds more context switches and buffer copies so it will consume more CPU and perhaps may slow things down a small amount. But since copying data is rate limited on the drives it won't add much overhead. –  Colin Ian King Nov 23 '12 at 22:32
In actual practice, you are VANISHINGLY unlikely to see pv add so much as 0.1% to the time-to-copy. If you do, it's almost certainly an operation so blindingly fast that there was no point in trying to add a progress bar in the first place. –  Jim Salter Nov 23 '12 at 22:34
Very true. I'm just and old style engineer who is just used to saving every cycle I can. –  Colin Ian King Nov 24 '12 at 14:43
@ColinIanKing - I actually just discovered today that while pv itself doesn't slow things down any, piping to STDOUT and STDIN can. For normal dd operations from one conventional hard drive to another, it won't have any impact... but if you have a VERY high performance SSD, it will. My new Intel 520 480GB SSD is capable of 340MB/sec contiguous reads or so, but if I pipe like dd if=/dev/sda bs=4M | dd of=/dev/null bs=4M it only does 276MB/sec or so. Sadface. (The effect is even nastier for cached reads, which may go as fast as 16GB/sec if not piped.) –  Jim Salter Nov 26 '12 at 4:55
revisiting this later yet: after some conversation with the author of pv, I discovered that you can avoid the speed penalty by taking dd out of the equation entirely: pv < /dev/sda > /dev/sdb works just fine, and will go every bit as fast as the underlying hardware is capable of going. –  Jim Salter Aug 10 '13 at 16:54

You can see how far it has got by sending it a SIGUSR1 signal. Find the process id using ps, e.g.

ps | grep dd
13230 pts/0    00:00:04 dd

and send dd the SIGUSR1 signal:

kill -SIGUSR1 13230

and you will see how much data it has copied and the transfer rate.

For a copying activity you are limited by I/O speed of the device, so the CPU should not be fully loaded, so don't worry about that.

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Noted. Well, I killed the process to figure out it was going quite slowly.. had to redo the partition table but it's back to all empty now. You know of any better ways to clone a hard drive the won't take all day? –  seanthewebber Nov 22 '12 at 18:28
@SeanWebber: running that command should not actually terminate the dd process. From man dd: "Sending a USR1 signal to a running dd process makes it print I/O statistics to standard error and then resume copying." To speed up the process try specifying a larger block size as Jim Salter suggests in the other answer. –  Sergey Nov 23 '12 at 0:31
OS X's dd must be broken since sending the SIGUSR1 killed it for me as well. –  Jarrod Davis Feb 8 at 20:59

I had a similar problem. The cause was different in my case.

The target drive is an external hard disk.

If the disk was mounted automatically via udisks and udisks-glue then the transfer rate from cdrom to the hd was about 40kB/s.

When I unmounted the hd and mounted it directly via mount I got a transfer rate of about 2.4MB/s.

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Please add more info to this answer like how to mount it using mount and not udisks. –  Parto Aug 23 at 9:10

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