DD Tips and tricks

DD is an extremly usefull tool for the seasoned and novice sys-admin here are some commands I have found usefull...

Create a file xKb in size containing random data.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/my_random.dat bs=1kb count=10

Simple time command for testing disk rw

time dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/writetest.tmp bs=1M count=1024

virt:~# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/tmp.tmp bs=1M count=1024

1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied,
2.67421 s, 402 MB/s