Pretty sure older Unixes wouldn't do "cat debian.iso > /dev/sdg" correctly, though not sure. If nothing else, 'dd' will pad out the final block, which can be h

Pretty sure older Unixes wouldn't do "cat debian.iso > /dev/sdg" correctly, though not sure. If nothing else, 'dd' will pad out the final block, which can be handy. Also, if you have lots of RAM and the file isn't too big, 'dd' can pull the whole thing into RAM before the first byte is written, which could be handy if you have a read I/O error.