DELL PowerEdge R730xd 2U 12 Bay 3.5" 2x Xeon E5-2620 v3 2.4GHz 64GB DDR4 12x 8TB H730 X520/I350 iDRAC8 2x 750W

Purpose-built storage server

The Dell PowerEdge R730xd is a 2U rack server populated with twelve 3.5-inch bays, dual Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3 processors at 2.4 GHz and 64 GB of DDR4 ECC memory. A PERC H730 controller with 1 GB cache manages the twelve installed 8 TB 7.2 K SATA drives, while an Intel X520/I350 daughter card adds two 1 GbE and two 10 Gb SFP+ ports. iDRAC 8 Enterprise and dual 750 W platinum supplies complete the configuration.

Who this suits and who should look elsewhere

This system fits teams that need dense, hot-swap SATA capacity behind a hardware RAID engine with dual-socket compute and out-of-band management. Buyers who require more than 24 DIMM slots, more than two processor sockets, or SSD-optimised all-flash performance should evaluate other platforms. The fixed 12-bay 3.5-inch chassis also limits deployments needing 2.5-inch density or additional PCIe expansion beyond the integrated networking.

Deciding specification: 12 x 8 TB SATA drives

The twelve 8 TB 7.2 K SATA drives delivered on the PERC H730 controller define the raw capacity and RAID flexibility of the platform. With support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 plus pass-through, this single specification determines whether the storage density and redundancy model match the workload.