Website: Making Haiku USB Stick - Mac OS improvement

The guide instructs the user to use this command:

sudo dd if=path/to/haiku-anyboot.image of=/dev/disk[x] bs=1m

Writing in this way to /dev/disk[x] is VERY slow. As in 45 minutes on a fast USB 2 drive slow. Simply changing to

sudo dd if=path/to/haiku-anyboot.image of=/dev/rdisk[x] bs=1m

will speed things up by a huge amount, like a couple of minutes to copy the whole image.

It would be nice to be able to make comments or suggestions like this on the web page itself, as I am not sure this will actually get to the right people.

Perhaps a few people could try it to check it works, and if so then update the guide?

[quote=Edglex]Yep, that’s a silly number of writes. bs=1m seems to work fine, I don’t if there’s a way to figure out an optimum other than empirically.

/dev/rdisk[x] writes directly to the disk (raw), instead of using some kind of buffer in a kernel driver that is used with /dev/disk[x], and is so much faster it’s unreal.

45 minutes to copy 700MB to a fast USB drive is too long, especially when you can just as easily do it in a minute or so by typing a single extra character![/quote]

There has to be something wrong with MAC os, becuase in Haiku a USB thumb drive with DD takes about 5-8 minutes on average for a ALPHA

The default value for ‘block-size’ is 256 bytes! Talk about a tons of handshakes needed.

Personally when in doubt I use bs=65536 but have found bs=2M to be the fastest and bs=4M will slow the transfer rate but quite a bit. I agree with you too that an update would be a good idea.

Yep, that’s a silly number of writes. bs=1m seems to work fine, I don’t if there’s a way to figure out an optimum other than empirically.

/dev/rdisk[x] writes directly to the disk (raw), instead of using some kind of buffer in a kernel driver that is used with /dev/disk[x], and is so much faster it’s unreal.

45 minutes to copy 700MB to a fast USB drive is too long, especially when you can just as easily do it in a minute or so by typing a single extra character!