I always assumed that dd was preferred when writing disk images to flash media to ensure each hardware block is written to exactly once, extending the live of t

I always assumed that dd was preferred when writing disk images to flash media to ensure each hardware block is written to exactly once, extending the live of the device and increasing performance substantially. I never checked if that's actually a problem with general-purpose file IO, nothing stops the kernel from noticing when a pipe is connected to a block device and configuring an appropriate buffer. status=progress is also quite handy. You can splice a "| dd status=progress |" in the middle of a pipeline to get a sense of what's happening.