Recently I tried to dd from an unhealthy HDD to a file. I used dd if=/dev/sdb of=somefile bs=4096 conv=noerror,sync. My problem was that dd wasted a lot of time when it encountered a bad block. In my use case I would gladly pay with some data loss for a faster result.
Is there any way to make the error handling faster? Maybe a kernel tweak (telling the HDD to make less effort for reading a block)? Or another program?
