Dell PowerEdge R730

The Dell PowerEdge R730 is a two-socket 2U rack server designed to cover a wide span of enterprise workloads from a single chassis design, using drive bay configuration and expansion slots to differentiate between compute-dense and storage-dense deployments rather than requiring separate hardware families. At its core sit two Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors, supporting core counts from 4 up to 22 per socket with 2.5MB of cache per core, paired with the Intel C610 series chipset. The 24 DDR4 DIMM slots accept 4GB through 128GB modules running at up to 2400MT/s, giving a theoretical ceiling of 3TB of system memory — more than enough headroom for memory-hungry hypervisor hosts or in-memory database instances, even when only partially populated. Storage configuration is where the R730 shows its versatility. Fitted with the 16 x 2.5" backplane, it supports SAS, SATA and nearline SAS SSDs or HDDs, reaching around 29TB using 1.8TB hot-plug SAS drives and favouring I/O-per-rack-unit density for virtualisation and OLTP databases. Fitted with the 8 x 3.5" backplane instead, capacity extends to roughly 64TB using 8TB NL SAS drives, which suits data warehousing, BI and HPC data node roles where sequential throughput and raw capacity matter more than spindle count. RAID is handled by PERC S130 software RAID or PERC H330, H730 and H730P hardware controllers, with PERC H830 available for external expansion. Seven PCIe 3.0 expansion slots plus a dedicated PERC slot leave room for additional HBAs, 10GbE network cards or up to two internal GPU accelerators, making the R730 a credible platform for GPU-assisted VDI environments and midrange medical imaging as well as conventional compute roles. Embedded networking options range from 4 x 1GbE up to 4 x 10GbE NDC configurations depending on how the unit was originally specified. Management is built around iDRAC8 with Lifecycle Controller, giving agent-free monitoring, at-the-server diagnostics via iDRAC Quick Sync, and integration with Dell OpenManage Essentials and OpenManage Mobile for fleet-level administration — features that remain fully functional on a refurbished unit and are worth checking during configuration if remote management matters to your deployment. Buying the R730 refurbished makes particular sense given how mature and well-documented this platform is: the E5-2600 v4 processor family, DDR4 memory and PERC controller lineup are all established, meaning compatibility and firmware behaviour are well understood rather than a moving target. Every unit sold through our configurator is tested and built to your specification before dispatch, and covered by a 3 year warranty.