Well, I was originally going to post this snippet in the original thread titled "how to output ones endlessly like /dev/zero", but that topic was closed without an efficient answer.
It was difficult to find (build) a satisfactory answer to this one, so I thought I'd share it here and as a "fill hard drive with ones like zero-fill" entry on commandlinefu.
This command seems to get me about 500MByte/min, though this is with a 1.5TB 'green' drive running only at 5400rpm so I imagine it'd be faster in most other cases.
tr '\000' '\377' < /dev/zero | dd bs=512 count=[drive bytes/512] status=noxfer | pipebench | sudo dd of=[output disk/partition, e.g. /dev/sdb]
Hope that helps someone
- Gliktch
P.S: Note that pipebench is required - this is probably available in your distro's repositories