CF Write Speed

I'm writing a whole partition at once and getting an interesting phenomena. The write speed is varying from 4.3-3.3MB/s which strikes me as quite a range 23% on a solid state disk. Ok It's a across a LAN but it's 1Gbit and only me on it.

Final figure was : 1883Mb 3.7MB/s 8m32s

Just to tickle me every time, the damn partition I backed up wasn't cleanly unmounted and I have to e2fsck the darn thing when I restore it thinking the install will be over before I need to do it again, the curse of the positive outlook.

Backing up is a bit quicker
dd if=/dev/sda | ssh 10.0.0.1 'cat > gentoo.sda'
...
2017419264 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 181.301 s, 11.1MB/s

I did the whole partition this time so I can boot it in Qemu
% time ssh 10.0.0.1 'cat gentoo.sda' > /dev/sda
real 9m1.404s