Re: How long will this take?
On Fri 19 Jun 2020 at 14:52:11 (-0700), David Christensen wrote:
> On 2020-06-18 19:13, David Wright wrote:
> > On Fri 12 Jun 2020 at 07:51:30 (-0400), Michael Stone wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 08:52:10PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> >
> > > > The only unaddressed point in my use case is the prevention of a
> > > > high-water mark, because zeroing the drive achieves precisely the
> > > > opposite. What ought I to be running, instead of badblocks -w -t random,
> > > > to achieve that goal?
> > >
> > > Create the encrypted volume first, then write zeros to it. :)
> >
> > Duh! That should work a treat. My posting that example bore me fruit.
>
> Benchmark is one thing. But, from a security viewpoint, writing zeros
> to an encrypted volume amounts to providing blocks of plaintext for
> corresponding blocks of cyphertext, thereby facilitating
> cryptanalysis.
So in view of the unlikelihood of badblocks actually logging something
more useful than SMART (where available) or normal disk write errors,
perhaps a compromise (for my use case) is to just write /dev/urandom
rather than /dev/zero. On this slow machine with an oldish PATA disk,
I can get about 75% speed from urandom, 15MB/s vs 20MB/s on a 29GiB
partition (no encryption). There's a noticeable slowdown because,
I presume, the machine runs a bit short of entropy after a while.
Cheers,
David.
Reply to: