DELL PowerEdge R730XD 2U rack server E5-2609 v3 1.9GHz 16GB DDR4 3x 1TB SATA H730

Dense 2U rack server for storage-heavy workloads

The Dell PowerEdge R730XD fits 24 hot-plug 2.5-inch drive bays into a 2U chassis. A single Xeon E5-2609 v3 six-core processor running at 1.9 GHz and 16 GB of DDR4 memory are installed. The Perc H730 RAID controller with 1 GB cache manages the three 1 TB 7.2 K SATA drives supplied. Dual 750 W redundant power supplies and a quad-port 1 GbE daughter card complete the base configuration.

Tool-less drive carriers

Each 2.5-inch bay uses a hot-plug carrier so drives can be swapped without shutting down or opening the chassis. The H730 controller supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60, letting administrators reshape arrays while the server runs. Two 750 W power supplies share the load; if one fails the other continues without interruption. The iDRAC8 Express module provides remote console, power control and hardware health monitoring over a dedicated management port.

PCIe 3.0 and 1 GbE set the expansion ceiling

Six PCIe 3.0 slots plus a dedicated RAID slot are available for additional controllers or network cards. The installed daughter card delivers four 1 GbE ports; optional NDCs can upgrade this to two 10 GbE plus two 1 GbE or four 10 GbE links. Memory tops out at 1 536 GB across 24 DDR4 slots, though the single processor limits active channels to twelve. Internal raw capacity maxes at 52 TB with 2.5-inch drives, and the Matrox G200eR2 graphics only serves basic console output.