Hey folks, my experience has been that when you make a "major" hardware change to a PC, such as adding a storage drive or two, sometimes programs see the PC as a new/different PC, and don't recognize your license.  Does anyone know if this is still true and/or if there is a way to avoid this from happening? 
 
Thanks!

If you are on windows 10 then no, on any other flavour then yes

Licenses are rarely linked to hard drives anymore, due to the many problems that approach incurs. People just replace disk drives too frequently for it to be practical. CPUs and network cards are another matter. But I wouldn't worry about adding new drives.
 
BTW, I hate your avatar. I keep thinking the server's hung again.

Thanks gents.  If I lose a license, I know where to find you.  Wait, not really.
 
Bit - I actually didn't change it.  I thought it was...  Well, not sure, but, yeah, annoying.  Definitely not my avatar.  A bug I guess, b/c it wasn't anything I did, I guess I'll upload it again!  Can't annoy the Bit-man - you've helped me too many times over the years to annoy!

I concur that for quite a while now, I have not seen where a hard drive change has triggered any license issue on my system, nor am I aware of this being any sort of common issue for others.
 
I have around 900 plugins or so, and I have worked my way up to a 5th hard drive on my primary DAW, and NEVER have I had to reauthorize any software following doing any alterations to the hard drive configuration on that computer.
 
The only recent time I have had to go through authorization again was following the Windows 10 Anniversary updates, and that only needed me to go through authorization for something like 3-4 of my plugin collections.
 
Bob Bone

Tying licenses to hard drives was once common practice, because the drive's serial number was the only consistent ID available in a typical computer. This was back before Pentium-class CPUs and network interfaces had become universal. Nowadays they've got MAC addresses and CPU serial numbers to reference, which are more stable (until you replace your motherboard, then it's re-authorize everything time).
 

Thanks again, having had to just go through the de-auth/re-auth process because I just had to reinstall W10, and I'm very relieved to not have to do it again!

Crap, will get on the avatar...

Hey bitflipper, is that better? I'm on my iPad, so I took a quick selfie. Nice hi-rez pic. 😜

bitflipper
Tying licenses to hard drives was once common practice, because the drive's serial number was the only consistent ID available in a typical computer. This was back before Pentium-class CPUs and network interfaces had become universal. Nowadays they've got MAC addresses and CPU serial numbers to reference, which are more stable (until you replace your motherboard, then it's re-authorize everything time).
 

Actually - I had to replace a motherboard, shortly after I had upgraded to Windows 10, and out of all of the software I have, I only had to reauthorize maybe 4-5 things.  Windows 10 seems to have FINALLY (waited 20+ years for this) built in a hardware abstraction layer - they largely separated the hardware from the software.  I thought I was going to have to re-install the world - but everything still worked, and I only had a small number of components that needed to get reauthorized.  I was quite the happy camper, actually.
 
Bob Bone