Folks,
We are having internal discussions on how to ship our storage servers and hard drives and I would like to ask opinions outside of our own.
A system that has known RAID requirements is pre-initialized before shipping. All drives are marked.
The choice is either shipping the server with all the HDD installed in place.... or shipping the server with the drives removed.
For the case of shipping installed...at the receiving end we highly recommend that all the HDD be reseated because we do see from time to time that a drive has worked itself loose enough to be an issue.
This takes only a couple of minutes to do on each system.
For the case of shipping with the HDD removed...the end user must match the drive to its documented position...so this takes a lot longer to repopulate the system(s).
So, feel free to chime in with your own opinions and exeriences on this subject.