That's an interesting and important distinction to make.
A factory reset provided by your laptop manufacturer (like Dell, HP, or Lenovo) is not the same as a pure clean install via a USB drive. Some manufacturer recovery tools feature an option to "Restore to Factory Settings," which may re-partition your entire storage setup, effectively wiping all internal drives to match the configuration the computer had when it left the factory. Step-by-Step: How to Perform a Safe Clean Install does clean install wipe all drives exclusive
A clean install is exclusive to the drive you select during setup. It does not possess the inherent ability to wipe your entire system across multiple separate drives. However, because the setup menu lists every drive using generic numbers, human error poses a major threat. That's an interesting and important distinction to make
When you perform a clean installation of Windows or macOS, the installer requires you to target a specific storage drive (usually designated as the C: drive on Windows). Step-by-Step: How to Perform a Safe Clean Install
To understand why your secondary drives are safe, we must define the terms.