dd is a very frustrating application. You often run it through complex pipes (well, I do), and you never know if it’s performing well (or if you forgot to tune the HD perf with hdparm before). The only thing you can is wait.

Well, not quite. If you read the doc, you would have found this :

       Sending  a  USR1  signal  to  a running ‘dd’ process makes it print I/O        statistics to standard error and then resume copying.               $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null& pid=$!               $ kill -USR1 $pid; sleep 1; kill $pid               18335302+0 records in 18335302+0 records  out  9387674624  bytes               (9.4 GB) copied, 34.6279 seconds, 271 MB/s

Interesting, isn’t it ? But I’ve found something even more interesting : pv (packaged in Debian/Ubuntu).

Description: Shell pipeline element to meter data passing through  pv (Pipe Viewer) can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes  to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it  has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be  until completion.  .  To use it, insert it in a pipeline between two processes, with the appropriate  options. Its standard input will be passed through to its standard output and  progress will be shown on standard error.

It’s very easy to use :

# dd if=/dev/hda12 | pv |dd of=/dev/hda13 88.2MB 0:00:04 [23.3MB/s] [                                               ] 

And it can even give an ETA if you use it like cat (e.g: pv file | nc -w 1 somewhere.com 3000).