On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 04:39:00PM +0000, prlw1@cam.ac.uk wrote:
> [...]
> By comparison, a Nov 2004 Fedora Core rescue CD
> Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.9-1.667 #1 Tue Nov 2 14:41:31 EST 2004 i686 unknown
> gives:
> 
>   % time dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=64k count=1000
>   1000+0 records in
>   1000+0 records out
> 
>   real    0m0.727s
>   user    0m0.006s
>   sys     0m0.060s

Note that on linux /dev/sda goes though the buffer cache. Your dd may not
have touched the disk at all. To be sure, can you try with a transfer at last
2x larger than your RAM (twice, to be sure to flush the entire cache).

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--