eSata can be moved from box to box?

I will caveat this with I am not able to check in here every day, so it is quite possible I missed this change along the way. I was always under the impression that if you moved an external esata drive from one box to another all the data would be lost?

I just got a replacement box because my old box had wiped my esata drives 4 times. I plug in the new receiver, hook up esata, boot up, and I am suprised to find the data, recordings, passes etc all there intact that I was using before the swap.

So was this changed at some point and I just missed it?

If I had known that I for sure would have switched out boxes sooner, but I didn't want to lose everything.