>> quickly instead of reading/seeking to the end? >Use > > seek=bytes > >See > > man dd That doesn't do it "quickly". It still reads through n bytes until it reaches the specified value which makes it equally painful as just dd'ing the whole device. At any rate, the objective was to clear out stale raid metadata so I ended up --forcing a single disk raid 1, stopping it, then running a --zero-superblock on it.