dd
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
4recommend
1warn against
Nov 24, 2025first mention
Oct 7, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“Long live dd! Except every time I use it I am terrified I'll blow out the brains of the wrong device :/”
“This looks great. Going to give it a try.”
Show 2 more
“But man, do I love me some dd.”
“On macOS / Linux you can use `dd` to "copy" everything from /dev/yourssd to /dev/null.”
Caveats and dissent
From the makers not counted in the ranking
“we can run docker on Mac’s with no vm. And its destroying qemu.”
Threads where it came up
- Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026) 2 mentions
- Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome 1 mention
- Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils 1 mention
- Patching my guitar amp's firmware 1 mention
- I Am Building a Cloud 1 mention
- You Need to Ditch VS Code 1 mention
Data: dd.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 8
“Long live dd! Except every time I use it I am terrified I'll blow out the brains of the wrong device :/”
“The 'wierd syntax' has finally been getopt-ified.”
“This looks great. Going to give it a try.”
“using `dd` on one of the device partitions”
Just for comparison I use the cheapest netcup root server: RS 1000 G12 AMD EPYC™ 9645 8 GB DDR5 RAM (ECC) 4 dedicated cores 256 GB NVMe Costs 12,79 € Results with the follwing command: fio --name=randreadwrite \ --filename=testfile \ --size=5G \ --bs=4k \ --rw=randrw \ --rwmixread=70 \ --iodepth=32 \ --ioengine=libaio \ --direct=1 \ --numjobs=4 \ --runtime=60 \ --time_based \ --group_reporting IOPS Read: 70.1k IOPS W
“Then there's `dd`...”
“But man, do I love me some dd.”
“On macOS / Linux you can use `dd` to "copy" everything from /dev/yourssd to /dev/null.”