DELL PowerEdge R730xd 12 Bay 3.5" 2U Rack Server 2x Xeon E5-2640 v3 2.6GHz 256GB DDR4 12x 6TB H730

Purpose-built 12-bay storage server

The Dell PowerEdge R730xd is a 2U rack server populated with twelve 3.5-inch drive bays, dual eight-core Xeon processors at 2.6 GHz and 256 GB of DDR4 ECC memory. A PERC H730 controller with battery-backed cache manages the twelve 6 TB SATA drives, while an Intel X520/I350 daughter card adds two 10 Gb SFP+ and two 1 GbE ports. Dual 750 W platinum power supplies and iDRAC8 Enterprise complete a platform aimed at capacity-dense workloads such as data warehousing, VDI storage nodes or HPC data tiers.

Suited for capacity-first deployments

This configuration fits teams that need a single chassis holding large amounts of rotational storage with hardware RAID flexibility and out-of-band management. Buyers who require all-flash performance, more than two processor sockets or a smaller rack footprint should evaluate other platforms. The 24 DIMM slots and 1.5 TB memory ceiling allow substantial expansion, but the LGA 2011-3 platform limits future CPU upgrades to the same generation.

Storage controller decides RAID scope

The PERC H730 1 GB mini controller supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 plus pass-through mode, defining exactly which redundancy and performance layouts are available for the twelve installed drives.