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.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell(a)gmail.com