The unique advantage of dd over cat, cp and friends: you can specify the block size.
Just try (on OS X) dd if=disk.img of=/dev/disk1... first speedup is gained by using rdisk1, but the real improvement comes with the bs=1m. 2 vs 16 vs 300 MB/s on my machine, when cloning via USB-SATA adapter.
Just try (on OS X) dd if=disk.img of=/dev/disk1... first speedup is gained by using rdisk1, but the real improvement comes with the bs=1m. 2 vs 16 vs 300 MB/s on my machine, when cloning via USB-SATA adapter.