Keep drive letters unchange for USB devices on Windows

Why not turn used computers into home network servers?

File Server - fs

A file server is a central place for home data. It has the following responsibilities:
1. Maintain data integrity (minimize data lose)
2. Backup
3. Allow data sharing and access control

External USB hard-disks are getting cheaper and are easier to maintain than internal ones. A handy tool for USB hard-disks is USBDLM - USB Drive Letter Manager for Windows. It allows a permanent drive letter to be assigned to a USB hard-disk by its permanent device-ID (and many other criteria). With this, it is now possible to use the same hard-disk for multiple computers (say if you have a desktop PC and a notebook) while be assured that the same drive letter can be used on every computer. In addition, now you can sign up for one online backup account (IDrive, MozyHome) and use it on multiple computers to backup the data from the same USB hard-disk.

Here is a sample minimum USBDLM configuration file to reserve drive letter F for my USB hard-disk:

[ExcludedLetters]
Letter1=F

[DriveLetters1]
DeviceID1=USBSTOR\DISK&VAN_WD&PRDXTERNAL&RE_V5.00\444333385654776334321212&0
Letter1=F

Media Center Server - mcs