dd has the advantage of specifying a larger buffer. I've seen for example that in MacOS writing an image to a SD card with the internal reader of my macbook is

dd has the advantage of specifying a larger buffer. I've seen for example that in MacOS writing an image to a SD card with the internal reader of my macbook is a lot faster with a block size of 1M in respect to the classical 4k. Also the advantage of dd is that you can run it with sudo easily, while with cat it will not work, since the redirection is done by the shell and not the cat binary itself, and you either have to open a root shell, or pipe the output of cat in `sudo tee filename >/dev/null` that is less than ideal. Also I think the problem is of Linux that lets you write on disks that are mounted. In MacOS is forbidden and you must umount the drive (so overwriting your root partition by error is impossible).