HP Multimedia PC / WinXP MCE Question

[dave_the_nerd]

Was there a rule saying Windows XP Media Center machines had to have two hard drives to get the certification sticker? Or something similar?

I was happily chugging away with my homebrew, and the corporate boxes at work never were anything fancy, so I missed it when it was happening, and I feel left out, like I missed out on history in the making.

But I've had to deal with a few Home Media PCs (or whatever the branding was) recently, all HPs, that had two identical hard drives. (built in the 2006-2008 range). Users being users, the second hard drive was empty and unused in every case. They were not RAIDed, no backups were occurring, they were just sitting there.

Was this a thing they did? Why? Why not RAID them at the factory? Or why not a single bigger drive?

[Zap]

It was probably to hit a certain capacity point at the cheapest cost possible. For instance, right now it is probably cheaper to get two 2TB drives than it is to get one 4TB drive. Specifications such as MHz (less these days), amount of RAM, amount of VRAM and amount of HDD space are bullet points when selling a computer.