What you getChassisDell PowerEdge R730xd, 2U rack
12x 3.5" LFF front bays + 2x 2.5" SFF rear flex-bay = 14 drive bays
The rear flex bay is the reason to want this chassis: run your boot or cache drives in back and keep all twelve front bays free for the array.Processors2x Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 (SR2JS)
22 cores / 44 threads each — 2.2 GHz base, 3.6 GHz turbo, 55 MB cache, 145W TDP
Total: 44 cores / 88 threadsRAIDDell PERC H730 —SAS and SATA, RAID 0/1/5/6/10/50/60.
For TrueNAS / Unraid / ZFS builds: the H730 can be switched to HBA (non-RAID) mode in the controller setup, which is what most software-RAID users want. Verify the behaviour suits your workload before committing to it.NetworkingDell 99GTM rack network daughter card — Intel X540 + i350
4x RJ-45: 2x 10GBASE-T (10 Gb) + 2x 1GBASE-T
10GBASE-T copper — no SFP+ transceivers needed, just Cat6/6a. Plus a dedicated iDRAC management port. On a fourteen-bay box the 10 Gb is the difference between the array being usable over the network and not.ManagementiDRAC8 Enterprise — full remote KVM console, virtual media, dedicated management NIC. License is tied to the service tag and stays with the server. USER/PSWD root/calvinPower2x Dell 1100W hot-plug PSUs, redundant 1+1. The larger supplies matter here: fourteen spinning drives plus two 145W CPUs plus a full memory load is real draw, and 1100W leaves headroom for an HBA or a GPU.Drive caddies10x 3.5" LFF caddies and 2x 2.5" SFF caddies included, all with mounting screws. That covers both rear flex-bay slots and eight of the twelve front bays.
Being straight with you: 2 front LFF bays have no caddy, so if you intend to fill all twelve you will need two more. Most listings in this price band ship with none at all, and ten caddies with hardware is not a trivial thing to replace.RailsCOMPLETE RAIL KIT INCLUDED. sliding ReadyRails II. Cable management arm not-included
Not optional on a machine like this — twelve loaded 3.5" drives is fifty-plus pounds of disk, and a fourteen-bay chassis has no business on a shelf. Most listings make you source rails separately.Memory support24 DIMM slots, DDR4 ECC RDIMM / LRDIMM, up to 2400 MT/s with these CPUs.
Not included — please read

• No memory. Zero RAM. You must supply DDR4 ECC registered memory; unbuffered desktop DDR4 will not work.
• No hard drives or SSDs.
• No operating system, no software, no licenses beyond the iDRAC Enterprise entitlement noted above.
• Power cords: None.

Nothing that is not listed above or visible in the photos is included.

Condition and testing

Used enterprise hardware pulled from a working environment. Cosmetic wear consistent with rack service — all photos are of the actual unit you will receive.

• Previous use: Homelab for LLM and AI Inference
• Tested: "Ran great as a Proxmox AI inference server with 512GB DDR4 RDIMMs, 4 X Ada RTX 4000's (not included in this sale). Posts to BIOS with both CPUs detected, PSU redundancy confirmed on both supplies, iDRAC Enterprise verified, all four NIC ports link up. System Event Log cleared; iDRAC and BIOS are updated to end of support! User: root PSWD: calvin.

Typical uses

Fourteen bays, 44 cores and 10 Gb networking is a storage server first: TrueNAS (CORE or SCALE), Unraid, Proxmox VE with ZFS, Ceph nodes, backup targets and Veeam repositories, media libraries and Plex or Jellyfin back-ends, surveillance/NVR storage, and general homelab or small-business bulk storage. The core count means it doubles comfortably as a virtualization host rather than being storage-only. iDRAC8 Enterprise gives full remote console and virtual media, so it can live headless in a rack or a basement.

Good to know before you buy

• This is a datacenter machine. It is loud at boot and under load and draws real power — two 145W CPUs plus whatever you hang off fourteen bays. Great in a rack or a basement, not in a living room.
• Platform age. Broadwell-EP (E5 v4) supports AVX2 but not AVX-512. The appeal is core count and bay count per dollar, not per-core speed.
• End of support — please read. Dell's 13th-generation PowerEdge line, which this server belongs to, has reached end of support life. Dell no longer publishes BIOS, firmware, or driver updates for this platform. Whatever versions are installed are the final releases Dell issued, CPU microcode included, and there will be no future security patches from Dell. Before buying, check your intended operating system or hypervisor's hardware compatibility list — newer enterprise hypervisor releases have begun dropping 13G hardware from their supported lists. Linux distributions and Proxmox VE run this generation without difficulty. I am calling this out up front rather than leaving you to discover it; for a homelab or a lab/dev workload it is usually a non-issue, and for a production estate under a compliance regime it may well be a dealbreaker.
• Drive support: the H730 handles SAS and SATA. NVMe requires a PCIe add-in card.

Shipping

Heavy item, approximately 48 lb boxed. Packed double-boxed with rigid foam, chassis lid latched, and fully insured. Local pickup available in Waymart PA 18472 — please message before buying to arrange.

Returns

No Returns. Questions before you buy are welcome — I would far rather answer them up front than have this travel twice.