[belorn]

I wonder how much companies pay yearly in order to avoid having an employee pick up a drive from a local store, drive to the data center, pull the disk drive, screw out the failing hard drive and put in the new one, add it in the raid, verify the repair process has started, and then return to the office.

[Symbiote]

I don't think I've ever seen a non-hot-swap disk in a normal server. The oldest I dealt with had 16 HDDs per server, and only 12 were accessible from the outside, bu the 4 internal ones were still hot-swap after taking the cover off.

Even some really old (2000s-era) junk I found in a cupboard at work was all hot-swap drives.

But more realistically in this case, you tell the data centre "remote hands" person that a new HDD will arrive next-day from Dell, and it's to go in server XYZ in rack V-U at drive position T. This may well be a free service, assuming normal failure rates.

[belorn]

Yes, I did write that a bit hasty. I changed above to the normal process. As it happened we just installed a server without hotswap disk, but to be fair that is the first one I have personally seen in the last 20 years.

Remote hands is a thing indeed. Servers also tend to be mostly pre-built now days by server retailers, even when buying more custom made ones like servermicro where you pick each component. There isn't that many parts to a generic server purchase. Its a chassi, motherboard, cpu, memory, and disks. PSU tend to be determined by the motherboard/chassi choice, same with disk backplanes/raid/ipmi/network/cables/ventilation/shrouds. The biggest work is in doing the correct purchase, not in the assembly. Once delivered you put on the rails, install any additional item not pre-built, put it in the rack and plug in the cables.

[amluto]

In the Bay Area there are little datacenters that will happily colocate a rack for you and will even provide an engineer who can swap disks. The service is called “remote hands”. It may still be faster to drive over.