title: How to 'warm up' EC2/EBS storage?
body: <p>I have seen advice to 'warm up' EC2 to overcome a first write penalty:-</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Warm up data partitions - There is one
    drawback to using disk IO in EC2: a
    “first write” performance hit when
    initially writing to new partitions.
    To avoid this penalty, you can “warm
    up” the partition by executing a sort
    of throw-away command that accesses
    it. For example, you can use the Linux
    dd command to write to the disk. While
    the penalty still occurs and cannot be
    avoided, at least the first write to
    your databases will not suffer the
    effects.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Source: <a href="http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1345-getting-the-most-out-of-mysql-in-the-amazon-cloud/" rel="noreferrer">http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1345-getting-the-most-out-of-mysql-in-the-amazon-cloud/</a></p>
  
  <p>...but I haven't found any further advice on best practice!  Is this true of EBS storage? Can anyone recommend the 'dd' syntax that will perform this warmup and how to ensure that all blocks are 'warmed'?</p>