DELL PowerEdge R730XD rack server 24 x 2.5" E5-2650 v3 10C 2.3GHz 16GB DDR4 H330

Purpose-built density

The Dell PowerEdge R730XD fits 24 hot-plug 2.5-inch drive bays into a 2U rack form, giving storage-heavy workloads a compact platform. A single Xeon E5-2650 v3 with 10 cores at 2.3 GHz and 16 GB of DDR4 handles virtualisation, database or file-serving tasks that benefit from local capacity over raw compute. The H330 controller supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and 60 across SAS or SATA drives. Buyers who need more than one processor or pre-populated drives should look elsewhere.

Sustained operation

Dual 750 W redundant power supplies keep the system running through a module failure without shutdown. The 24 DIMM slots allow memory to grow to 1536 GB, so the memory subsystem can scale with data-set size rather than hitting a ceiling early. Six PCIe 3.0 slots plus a dedicated RAID slot provide room for additional NICs or HBAs as throughput demands rise. The iDRAC8 remote-management console lets administrators monitor thermals and power draw continuously from a separate network.

Day-to-day physicals

Hot-plug drive carriers let technicians swap disks without tools or downtime while the server stays in the rack. The front bezel and included rail kit simplify installation in standard cabinets. A Matrox G200 video chip with 8 MB cache supplies basic console output for BIOS or OS install. Four onboard 1 GbE ports on the daughter card handle management and data traffic; optional 10 GbE NDCs can be added later. The DVD-ROM remains available for legacy media installs.