Yev from Backblaze here -> sure we can, but the datacenter guys are very analytical, they take time in to consideration as theirs is at a premium, so they could do it in the datacenter, but we'd much rather have them prelabeled.
This could be automated. A very simple computer with a SATA port and a USB label printer should be able to neatly print a tag with relevant drive data for every drive it sees through the SATA port.
At least the human error part would be mitigated. With some clever connector design, I guess a drive could be labeled in 5 seconds or less. If you do it for all drives before mounting, you'd get a single standard label for every unit.
Definitely something to consider if we scale this up. Right now if we were to propose that to our ops team their heads might explode. Gotta make sure they are open to new workflows first :*D