From Wikipedia:
A block is a unit measuring the number of bytes that are read, written, or converted at one time.
...
For some uses of the dd command, block size may have an effect on performance. For example, when recovering data from a hard disk, a small block size will generally cause the most bytes to be recovered. For greater speed during copy operations, a larger block size may be used. When dd is used for network transfers, the block size may have an impact on packet size, depending on the network protocol used.
