Jack is evident to me that you don't know what you're talking about and for sure you're not a UNIX person either. Any "good" and "experienced" UNIX administrator can clone the image of any disk. There are several ways to do it using the command line...Ah; I forgot...you're a Windows Guru clicking away the icons on a GUI. Also, don't forget mirroring (RAID 2 or 0+1) which has been used for more than 10 years so far and now we have ZFS. I think you should investigate before you come up with your articles. EMC, NetApps, and many other systems used in industry can do everything on the fly without the SysAdmin knowing about it...I been there and done that.