Editing Disk cloning (section)

== Background ==
[[File:Cloning Hard disk drive.jpg|left|thumb|251x251px|'''Figure 1''': An illustration of connecting two drives to a computer to clone one drive (the source drive) to another (the destination) drive.]]
Disk cloning occurs by copying the contents of a drive called the source drive. While called "disk cloning", any type of storage medium that connects to the computer via [[USB]], [[NVMe]] or [[SATA]] can be cloned. A small amount of data is read and then held in the computer's memory. The data is then either written directly to another (destination) drive or to a [[disk image]]. 

Typically, the destination drive is connected to a computer (Fig. 1). Once connected, a disk cloner is used to perform the clone itself.  A hardware-based drive cloner can be used which does not require a computer.<ref name=":3">{{Cite web |date=2021-12-28 |title=Everything You Should Know About Hard Drive Duplicators |url=https://www.minitool.com/partition-disk/hard-drive-duplicator.html |access-date=2023-01-09 |website=MiniTool |language=en-US}}</ref> However, software cloners tend to allow for greater flexibility because they can exclude unwanted data from being duplicated reducing cloning time. For example, the filesystem and partitions can be resized by the software allowing data to be cloned to a drive equal to or greater than the total used space. Most hardware-based cloners typically require for the destination drive to be the same size as the source drive even if only a fraction of the space is used.<ref name=":3"/> Some hardware cloners can clone only the used space but tend to be much more expensive.