Can I trade boot drives between identical computers?

You should be able to do this easily, and Windows Activation should be smart enough to keep your PCs activated under their current (but perhaps swapped) online activations. If worst comes to worst -- and it shouldn't -- you can always switch back.
HTH,
--Ed--

The license key is tied to one of the hardware ids for the particular PC. If you get into difficulty you could try contacting the regional MS activation phone number.

This may also help:
Use Activation Troubleshooter in Windows 10 | Windows 10 Tutorials

@dalchina and @bogeyman3027: according to @Kari and what I've read elsewhere, the hardware ID used to calculate machine identity for license management does not factor in the storage devices used (either for the OS, or otherwise present) on the PC. That's why it's my belief that this kind of swap won't pose problems for the activation process after the change. That said, Dalchina is entirely correct to observe that a phone call should be enough to resolve any difficulties that might appear, my beliefs and the best information I can gather about this calculation notwithstanding.
HTH,
--Ed--

dalchina said:

The license key is tied to one of the hardware ids for the particular PC. If you get into difficulty you could try contacting the regional MS activation phone number.

This may also help:
Use Activation Troubleshooter in Windows 10 | Windows 10 Tutorials

Microsoft now has online activation


https://microsoft.gointeract.io/inte...4&token=pMU2Ok

zbook said:

...If you can move a drive from one computer to another won't there be a limited number of activations / year before there are problems?

Shouldn't be a problem. The digital license is tied to the PC hardware. Activation just requires that the PC's hardware has a digital license for the edition (Home or Pro) being run on that hardware.

Keys can have limited numbers of activations but once you have clean installed W10, even using a key, subsequent activations are done by looking for a digital license for that PC's hardware ID. There's no limit on the number of times you can clean install on a PC once it has a license, swapping drives should be no different.

zbook said:

NavyLCDR ,
When I had attempted to move drives from one computer to the other of identical configuration they failed.
These two computers each had 750 Gb HD in primary bays.
The computers had 32 GB flash drives for raid 0 flash cache.
So the failure that was seen may be for breaking and then reconstructing raid 0 rather than an activation problem.

Some people may be the only user of computers and want to work on their personal files in multiple locations.
They could have multiple windows licenses and move flash drives.
Alternatively, if they can move the SSD drive to each computer they could have just one Windows license.
If you can move a drive from one computer to another won't there be a limited number of activations / year before there are problems?

Simply swapping drives in a non raid configuration is very likely to work, especially for very similar hardware - Windows 10 is very good at resolving hardware driver changes. It is rare you need to sysprep even for a simple swap.

There will not be any issues re. activation as each pc will have its own digital licence tied to mobo id, and the digital licence is stored on line.

I routinely swap vhds between activated vms loads of times which is effectively the same and never once had an issue. Digital licence limits, only apply if transferring the digital licence to a new mobo.