Is it better to use cat, dd, pv or another procedure to copy a CD/DVD? (2015)(unix.stackexchange.com)

    Performance. This is an I/O-bound process; the main influence in performance
    is the buffer size: the tool reads a chunk from the source, writes the chunk
    to the destination, repeats. If the chunk is too small, the computer spends 
    its time switching between tasks. If the chunk is too large, the read and 
    write operations can't be parallelized. The optimal chunk size on a PC is 
    typically around a few megabytes but this is obviously very dependent on the 
    OS, on the hardware, and on what else the computer is doing. I made benchmarks
    for hard disk to hard disk copies a while ago, on Linux, which showed that
    for copies within the same disk, dd with a large buffer size has the advantage,
    but for cross-disk copies, cat won over any dd buffer size.

  cdrdao read-cd --read-raw