DELL PowerEdge R730xd 2U 24 Bay 2.5" 2x Xeon E5-2640 v3 2.6GHz 8C 256GB DDR4 H730 2x 800GB SSD

Dense 2U compute and storage node

The Dell PowerEdge R730xd packs dual eight-core Xeon processors at 2.60 GHz with a 3.4 GHz turbo into a 2U rack chassis. Twenty-four 2.5-inch drive bays sit behind a hot-swap backplane fed by a PERC H730 controller with 1 GB cache. Two 800 GB SATA SSDs ship installed, and the system includes a quad-port network daughter card with dual 1 GbE and dual 10 Gb SFP+ links. iDRAC 8 Enterprise and redundant 750 W platinum power supplies complete the package.

Suits virtualisation hosts and dense database nodes

Teams that need high core counts and large memory capacity in minimal rack space will fit two processors and up to 1.5 TB of DDR4 across twenty-four slots. The eight-core configuration limits single-thread throughput, so workloads that depend on maximum frequency per thread should evaluate higher-clocked alternatives. Organisations requiring GPU acceleration or more than two sockets must look beyond this platform.

Twenty-four 2.5-inch bays drive capacity planning

The front-loading bay count is the primary constraint for storage-heavy deployments; each bay accepts SATA or SAS media through the H730 controller supporting RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60. Populating all slots with enterprise SSDs or high-capacity HDDs determines total raw capacity and IOPS ceiling. Buyers must match drive selection to the controller's 12 Gb/s SAS/SATA interface and the system's 2.5-inch form factor.