How long to zero a 2TB drive w/ dd over USB?

[BigToque]

I'm RMA'ing a WD20EARS drive that failed WD's drive diagnostic tool due to too many bad sectors. I decided to zero out the drive with dd before sending it in. It's been running for almost 34 hours now.

I used the command: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

I figured it would take about a day, but apparently it's a lot longer than that.

Is there any way to poll the program to see it's progress? Or do I just gotta wait it out?

 

[mi11k1]

did you ever answer this ?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

did you ever answer this ?

Newer versions of dd (Ubuntu 16 and later, among others) have a show-progress feature built in.

If you want to do it the old fashioned way, use either pv or the kill -USR1 command, as outlined here:

How do you monitor the progress of dd?

dd is a wonder. It lets you duplicate a hard drive to another, completely zero a hard drive, etc. But once you launch a dd command, there's nothing to tell you of its progress. It just sits there a...

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