[Nottingham] Very slow dd if=/dev/random

[Ben Blackburne]

On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 09:28, Martin wrote:

> Meanwhile, I tried:
> dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hdg bs=1M
<snip>
> So why doesn't this work at 10's MBytes a second?

Just a guess really - /dev/random requires generating random numbers
which I think are "truly" random - they come from an entropy store
generated by mouse movements, network activity etc.

So this probably takes a while to generate.

Hopefully

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdg bs=1M

should whizz along?