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If drives are accessible via trays from outside the server.
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To be hotswappable the enclosure (or backplane) and controller must be hotswappable. As PowerEdgeTech suggested a good clue is trays accesable from the outside. Look in Device Manager to get the scoop on the hard drive controller and look it up on the internet. That is another good indicator.
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Thanks for the suggestions. &nbsp;Will try them all
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Super unlikely that you will have externally-accessible drives on a server that has a backplane/controller that doesn't support it, unless it was modified after-market. Good luck!
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Thanks to everyone that replied to this post
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I am looking at a server a company has. &nbsp;The company has Windows Essentials 2012. &nbsp; The company has no documentation for the server. &nbsp;I wanted to know if there is an easy way to determine if &nbsp;it has hot swappable hard drives installed. &nbsp;<br />
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Thanks.
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I am looking at a server a company has.  The company has Windows Essentials 2012.   The company has no documentation for the server.  I wanted to know if there is an easy way to determine if  it has hot swappable hard drives installed.  

Thanks.

How can you tell if a Windows Server has hot swappable drives

A personal computer is a general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities and price make it useful for individuals, and is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer time-sharing models that allowed systems to be used by many people, usually at the same time. Personal computers may be connected to a local area network (LAN), either by a cable or a wireless connection, and through that to the Internet. A personal computer may be a laptop computer or a desktop computer running an operating system such as Windows, Linux or Macintosh OS.

Windows Server 2012 is the server version of Windows 8 and the successor to Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Server 2012 is the first version of Windows Server to have no support for Itanium-based computers since Windows NT 4.0. Windows Server 2012, now in its second release (Windows Server 2012 Release 2) includes Foundation, Essentials, Standard and Datacenter, and does not support IA-32 or IA-64 processors.

Windows Server 2012

Storage devices include any device used for storing and retrieving digital information. Hard disk drives (HDDs) use one or more rigid ("hard") rapidly rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order and not only sequentially. The primary competing technology for secondary storage is flash memory in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs), but HDDs remain the dominant medium for secondary storage due to advantages in price per bit and per-device recording capacity. CD-RW (Compact Disc-ReWritable) is a digital optical disc storage format that allows information to be stored outside the mechanical HDD.

Storage Hardware

Servers are computing devices that are similar to desktop computers in that they have the same basic components, but are significantly different in size, configuration and purpose. Servers are usually accessed over a network, and many run unattended, without a computer monitor, input device, audio hardware or USB interfaces. Many servers do not have a graphical user interface (GUI), and are configured and managed remotely. Servers typically include hardware redundancy such as dual power supplies, RAID disk systems, and ECC memory, along with extensive pre-boot memory testing and verification. Critical components might be hot swappable, and to guard against overheating, servers might have more powerful fans or use water cooling.

Server Hardware

Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media used to retain digital data. In addition to local storage devices like CD and DVD readers, hard drives and flash drives, solid state drives can hold enormous amounts of data in a very small device. Cloud services and other new forms of remote storage also add to the capacity of devices and their ability to access more data without building additional data storage into a device.