DELL PowerEdge R730XD 2U rack server 2x E5-2609 v3 1.9GHz 16GB 3x 1TB H330

Purpose-built 2U storage server

The Dell PowerEdge R730XD fits 24 hot-plug 2.5-inch drive bays into a 2U rack form factor. Dual Xeon E5-2609 v3 six-core processors at 1.9 GHz and 16 GB of DDR4 memory provide the compute base. A PERC H330 RAID controller manages the three installed 1 TB 7.2K SATA drives and supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and 60. Redundant 750 W power supplies and iDRAC8 remote management come standard.

Storage-dense workloads versus compute-heavy needs

This chassis suits archives, backup targets, surveillance recording or any application that prioritises drive count over raw CPU frequency. The six-core CPUs and 16 GB baseline memory limit virtualization density and database throughput, so hyper-converged clusters or heavy analytics should look elsewhere. Expansion headroom exists via 24 DIMM slots and six PCIe 3.0 slots, yet the starting point remains modest.

24-bay 2.5-inch hot-plug capacity

The defining specification is the ability to populate up to 24 SATA or SAS drives in a 2U enclosure, delivering a 52 TB raw ceiling with the installed controller. That bay count drives the purchase decision for capacity-centric deployments.