Can I use Etcher for drive cloning to multiple drives via a usb external drive bay?

balenaEtcher
1

Hey all this is my first post here so please be kind lol.

Long story short I work for my local branch of a popular thrift stores eBay like alternative and do some of there tech stuff.

I’m trying to streamline the process that I currently use to sanitize and reinstall operating systems on laptops.

For example my current set up is using a live USB of Parted to sanitize the drives that are accessed by a three bay external USB 3.0 Drive bay. That after they are sanitized I take and reinstall the drives back into the machines and from there I reinstall windows 10(a light version of Linux coming soon for older laptop) via the usual USB media one at a time.

All the while having to wait while one finishes before I can move onto the next one as I only have one universal laptop charger.

Now why am I here?

I was making a live boot of mint for the first time and saw that etcher had a cloning option and was wondering if I could use it to clone a drive with a fresh OS install onto the drives via my external bays or would I be able to flash a Iso onto them directly?

Does etcher have any issues picking up and or cloning to multiple drives from one usb source (USB 3) and if so is it at a ok speed?

I know that there is this really cool external etcher thing but it is kind of out of budget for something that we currently do not have the volume of product to justify the purchase of for the moment.

I am really new to this part of tech so sorry if I’m not using the terms exactly right.

Thanks in advance.

3

Hello, balena-cli has a flash option, so if EtcherPro is not within your budget, you can script something with this instead.

$ balena local flash --help
Flash an image to a drive.

USAGE
  $ balena local flash <image>

ARGUMENTS
  <image>  path to OS image

FLAGS
  -d, --drive=<drive>  the drive to write the image to, eg. `/dev/sdb` or `/dev/mmcblk0`.
                       Careful with this as you can erase your hard drive.
                       Check `balena util available-drives` for available options.
  -h, --help           Show CLI help.
  -y, --yes            answer "yes" to all questions (non interactive use)

DESCRIPTION
  Flash an image to a drive.

  Flash a balenaOS image to a drive.
  Image file may be one of: .img|.zip|.gz|.bz2|.xz

  If --drive is not specified, then it will interactively
  show a list of available drives for selection.

EXAMPLES
  $ balena local flash path/to/balenaos.img

  $ balena local flash path/to/balenaos.img --drive /dev/disk2

  $ balena local flash path/to/balenaos.img --drive /dev/disk2 --yes