There are always alternative ways to prove your identity to banking institutions by using other bits of identification.

But he isnt dealing with a banking institution. He is dealing with software.

If he was sincere, then he could buy similar hard drives and do block-level cloning and then gain extra attempts to access the data - at least in theory.

Yea, that's going to probably be a no, the program most likely does MAC level authentication, so the difference in hard drives will be noted.