I recently had to create a bootable USB drive, and tried following the instructions on the Arch wiki[1] to just use coreutils: # cat path/to/archlinux-versio

I recently had to create a bootable USB drive, and tried following the instructions on the Arch wiki[1] to just use coreutils: # cat path/to/archlinux-version-x86_64.iso > /dev/sdx or # dd bs=4M if=path/to/archlinux-version-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdx conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress However, this was ridiculously slow. I waited a long time for cat, but not long enough to figure out if it would ever finish. dd reported speeds of less than half a MB/s, gnome-disk-utility was about eight times faster. I wonder if a different set of options to dd would have given better results. From what I can tell, gnome-disk-utility is just open() and write() (with suitable flags) in the end. 1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/USB_flash_installation_medium#Using_basic_command_line_utilities https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/USB_flash_installation_medi...