Coco gets dry pockets too and should never be allowed to totally dry, because it becomes hydrophobic- an automatic drip system is safest.

I've never heard of that problem, but I've also never cloned into soilless (I tried coco once but wasn't happy with my results and discovered my Clonex was no good anyway, lol). I use rapidrooters for cloning, with dip-n-grow.