What? Yes dd absolutely is a disk writing tool, although that is not the only or even the tool's intended primary purpose. It is useful for generating serial

What? Yes dd absolutely is a disk writing tool, although that is not the only or even the tool's intended primary purpose. It is useful for generating serial IO for a variety of purposes. For example, writing data with specific target block size; allocating contiguous blocks for use by an application (be it zeroing out a thin LUN before partitioning, or a file system); or simply dumping the content of one device to another (or to a file). Good luck stretching out a thin LUN or creating an empty file that allocates contiguous space with cat.