It's based off a lot of different components. HD is one strike. Graphics card is one. MAC Address is 3. Motherboard serials, we're not sure. Nobody's activation has survived a mobo change.
Well they don't really fail often do they? Of course they might at any time (or perhaps you have been unlucky) but in the last 15 years none have failed me and I backed up my Windows 7 installation onto a LaClie I bought in the late '90's yesterday before upgrading to 10. Don't worry - if you have a valid license then you can always call them - no change there.
It's depend on Grade and therefore cost!! Seagate Server Grade HDD's are OK, but the others??! WD the better are the Black WD's!
Sorry for some mis-typing in some post's, just found that I need to change the Batteries in my Logitech Keyboard tomorrow, I constantly lose some characters while typing!! Anyway. time to go to bed, it's midnight already in Thailand! Good Night!
Or Western Digital, or Toshiba, or any HD/SSD by any manufacturer really... They all fail, some more unexpectedly than others.
I have tried all: WD, Toshiba, Seagate, Lacie. My choice to this date is WD. I have still 5 years old WDTVLive Hub up and running with 1 terabytes of data. It didn't fail a single day!!!
lol ... they fail or they don't. Had a Seagate 2 month old with all data installed (backup made of course) and next day some rumble, some clicking, was during HDD times, and disc said Bye Bye. warranty but consider if I didn't make a backup, all data were gone. So guys always make as many backups as you can arrange to not loose data > three most wanted IT procedures are: Backup, Backup and again Backup
I know this typical brand Seagate has earned itself a good reputation among failing drives. Made in China?
there are and were lots of brand names of disc manufacturers but in fact there are only few who really make'em. The brand names were marketing names to associate the brand name to a certain valued like home entertainment product line for example. Nobody would buy a disc named blabla.inc, you know what I mean. Manufacturing places are wide-spread all over the Asian area and I refuse to say that it is bad because it is China made. Robots mostly do the job independent where they are located though. Malfunction is a problem with all products on our planet ... if it occurs ... and it probably will one day, sometimes earlier, sometimes later
Just to throws this out there to ponder. If you are moving from one qualifying machine to anotherr qualifying machine (7 or 8.1) it may very well have no issue with you doing so in the first year. Now both of those machines have upgraded as MS wanted you to do to begin with.
I've had my activated 10 on at least two other drives (everything else the same) for testing purposes and haven't lost activation. Historically I can never remember losing activation with only a hard drive change, or even that and a video card change, in XP or 7. It goes by some sort of 'points' system. Done quite a few since I've had a repair business for 25 years! Change the motherboard--that's different.
They have the highest fail rate of any brand, but when they work, they typically work fine for the duration.
I did win10 pro fresh install (not cloning) on 3 different hard disks + 1 VHD and did not loose activation on any of them. Same pc, of course.
I moved an exact 1:1 clone image of my desktop Windows 10 PC to my Macbook Pro for software development in a virtual machine a week ago. However, before doing this, the VM on Macbook Pro was running 8.1 and I did the 8.1->10 upgrade in the virtual machine. I then formatted the VM and moved the desktop image over to it, because I wanted to use the desktop's clean install. I am still activated, but I am not sure whether I am activated because I first did the 8.1->10 upgrade, or if I would have still been activated even if I skipped the upgrade step Completely different hardware (desktop: Xeon 6-core processor, ASUS motherboard, 12GB ram; Macbook Pro: Core i5, 16 GB ram...well a Mac )
My 5. test: I make a clone of an activated Windows 10 with WinToUSB on an external USB3 HDD (not SSD, both HDD, but different size and different brand) I do not boot from external USB3 HDD I changed the internal HDD with external (USB3) HDD and boot. Windows shows: "activated" I rebuild the cloned HDD back to USB3 case and boot the cloned HDD via USB3: Windows shows: "not activated". I rebuild the cloned USB3 HDD back into the notebook and boot. Windows shows: "not activated". I think this means: Cloning an activated Windows 10 to another drive keeps activation (see c). Booting via USB3 lost the activation (see d). A lost activation is not restored (see e).
Since you already upgraded from Windows 8 to 10 and activated. Any fresh install or clone back to the same machine will automatically get activated from now on...