Review Dell is a company with many arms: it does servers, laptops, desktops and like its competitors, tries to have those arms positioned in as many different areas of IT as possible. The server arm has extended us a Poweredge R730 2U server to review and it has served as a good reminder of why Dell servers are so popular.

The Poweredge R730 is one of the newer Poweredge servers, succeeding the Sandy Bridge-based R720 with a pair of Haswell-based Xeon E5-2690v3 12-core 2.6GHz processors. It has 24 DDR4 DIMM slots that can handle up to 768GB of RAM. The test unit only came with 64GB DDR4-2133, but that’s more than enough for our tests. Our R730 server came with two 1TB 7200RPM Constellation 2 drives, stationed inside the two mostly metal drive caddies that came with the server.

It has eight hot-swap bays on the front of the chassis (and can be expanded up to 16). Having worked with flimsy, delicate drive caddies extensively in the past and having them be a complete nuisance Dell’s craftsmanship certainly impresses on the little details like this.

The only plastic bits are the black latching mechanism and the transparent status indicator conduits. These are drive caddies that will sustain years of service, something that may mean little to some, but to folks like us who have done our time as rack monkeys it certainly is appreciated.

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