Alternative to k3b? or why is everything soooooo slow?

[Bruce Labitt]

mike ledoux wrote:

>
>A better 'real' test of read speed would be to run:
>
>  dd if=/dev/hdd bs=1M count=10 > /dev/null; \
>  time dd if=/dev/hdd bs=1M count=4096 > /dev/null
>
>with a 'good' DVD of known size in the drive.  Based on your drive's
>numbers, I'd expect it to take around 8-15 minutes to read 4GB of
>data from a DVD-R.
>
>  
>
>>The above timing was performed after the following command:
>># hdparm -X66 -c3 -u1 -d1 /dev/hdc
>>
>>Anymore ideas?  I really don't know where to go from here.  Thanks for 
>>all the help so far!
>>    
>>
>
>What results do you get from a dummy burn after running that hdparm
>command?
>
>  
>
I tried the "real" read test and got these results:
dd if=/dev/hdc bs=1M count=10 > /dev/null; \
 > time dd if=/dev/hdc bs=1M count=4096 > /dev/null

10+0 records in
10+0 records out
4020+1 records in
4020+1 records out

real    6m6.223s
user    0m0.017s
sys     0m4.717s


So if I understand correctly this means to perform a file copy from the 
device /hdc of 1MB in size 10 times to /dev/null?
Then time it?  If so what do these results mean?

As for the dummy burn - can't do that with +R media apparently :(  Guess 
I'll make another coaster...

Bruce