SSD's do not generally come with a usb connection.
I should have said SATA...
My overarching point was not the type of connection, but rather that both drives need to be connected simultaneously in order to complete the cloning operation.
....
Does the cloning operation really wipe out all the data on the HDD? Or does it just wipe out the boot sector and leave the data intact? For instance, if you have a 2 Gig HDD with 1 Gig of data (In out case photos
) and want to install a 500 MB SSD, can this be done?
I've only used a couple different applications to clone hard drives and I don't believe either reformatted the the drive; I believe it simply wipes the boot sector to prevent you from copying a fully functional version of Windows (or another licensed OS) from one drive to another because of licensing issues. Every time I've cloned a drive I've gotten a warning letting me know the source drive, once cloned, will no longer be bootable. If installed as "slave" I would think the data would be intact. Emphasis on "think". It's not something I would depend on, personally, until I knew for sure.
That being said, I've never tried to clone a larger drive to a smaller one so in all honesty I'm not sure what would happen if you did. I
suspect the cloning software would not allow it but I could be wrong about that. I think a lot would depend on the software you were using.