And it's extremely fast:

  $ pv /dev/zero > /dev/null
  18.6GB 0:00:05 [3.76GB/s] [    <=>                                            ]

The really amusing thing is that (at least on my machine) it's pv that's the bottleneck there; I have it using 101% cpu, anyhow. pv will give me 9.7GB/s, whereas dd will give me 13.3GB/s (also at 100% cpu). I wonder if anything's faster than dd :)

> pv will give me 9.7GB/s

Wow. What kind of hardware is your /dev/null ? Do you use striping ?

I won't use anything that doesn't have 5-nines uptime guaranteed by an SLA.

Until there's an enterprise-level solution for /dev/null, I think I'm going to have to stick with S4.

Someone should patent it!