On Thursday 30 August 2007 12:28, Raymond Page wrote:
> John,
>
> He wanted random data. If I wanted to generate a large file, I would
> do it your way too. However a random filled file seemed to be the
> goal. Using an audio cd guarantees some pretty random data
> (relatively to the sorts of noise various music can have) and it costs
> nothing from /dev/random or /dev/urandom.

But an audio CD will run out of data before you fill a 1GB file. Region
encoding tries to get in the way with a DVD.

For repeated use, I would be inclined to create a DVD full of data from
urandom, then use dd to pull data off of it with various offsets to create
test files. Or you could copy a few music CDs to one big file that you burn
to your DVD to create a collection of semi-random data for test files.

- Bob