benyben, a cloned drive is simply a hard drive that has been cloned/mirrored from another drive (as its source).  casascius has his mining rig set up, and sells drives that are perfect mirrors of his setup.  So if you got a drive like that from him, it'd be a plug and play type of thing, assuming some hardware matches.

There are quite a few users with impressive rigs on the site.  They would all have tokens of wisdom to smooth any bumps on your mining path.