Which of the below mentioned activities is the user performing with the step given above?

A user runs the command “dd if=/dev/xvdf of=/dev/null bs=1M” on an EBS volume created from a snapshot and attached to a Linux instance.

Which of the below mentioned activities is the user performing with the step given above?
A . Pre warming the EBS volume
B . Initiating the device to mount on the EBS volume
C . Formatting the volume
D . Copying the data from a snapshot to the device

View Answer

Answer: A

Explanation:

When the user creates an EBS volume and is trying to access it for the first time it will encounter reduced IOPS due to wiping or initiating of the block storage. To avoid this as well as achieve the best performance it is required to pre warm the EBS volume. For a volume created from a snapshot and attached with a Linux OS, the “dd” command pre warms the existing data on EBS and any restored snapshots of volumes that have been previously fully pre warmed. This command maintains incremental snapshots; however, because this operation is read-only, it does not pre warm unused space that has never been written to on the original volume. In the command “dd if=/dev/xvdf of=/dev/null bs=1M”, the parameter “if=input file” should be set to the drive that the user wishes to warm. The “of=output file” parameter should be set to the Linux null virtual device, /dev/null. The “bs” parameter sets the block size of the read operation; for optimal performance, this should be set to 1 MB.