Dell PowerEdge 13G

Dell R730 storage expansion

This document offers bullet-pointed guidance on expanding R730 platform storage.

System overview

The Dell R730 is a 2U dual-socket platform available in LFF (3.5” disks), SFF (2.5” disks) and xd (expanded disk density) variants. These servers are 13th generation Dell PE and are generally out of support. Parts are cheap and plentiful.

Typical storage configuration

Out of the box, LFF supports eight 3.5” drives and SFF supports sixteen 2.5” drives (an extra cheap eight-drive SFF variant was also sold). The R730xd is for those desiring more storage. R730xd LFF adds a top row of 3x3.5” bays (12 total) and the SFF adds a third 8-drive cage (24 total). Both of the xd models eliminate the front control panel and optical drive.

Boot disk support

This generation of PowerEdge (13G) was the era of Integrated Dual SD Modules (IDSDM) as boot devices. Fine for some platforms, not fine for ZFS. Mine went to a farm upstate. The R730s also have a couple internal SATA headers and an internal USB 3.0 port.

Expansion options

Rear flex bays

The R730xd LFF and SFF support two 2.5” flex bays in the rear, over the PSUs.
Part number NHDXG. Drop-in, tool-free, plug and play. The cage uses the standard Dell 2.5” drive caddies. The R730xd SFF and LFF both support the flex bay expansion. The standard-density R730 chassis does not support flex bays.

Internal mid-plane bays

The Dell R730xd LFF supports a 4x3.5” mid bay that drops in on top of the CPUs and RAM. This requires installing less efficient low-profile heatsinks, and the cage uses non-standard low-profile metal drive caddies.

The R730xd SFF does not support this add-on. The metal chassis is designed with interference-fit slots, and the SFF chassis appears intentionally designed to disallow this addon. I ordered the entire parts assembly for my R730xd SFF and tested it on two different servers.

Part numbers:

  • 4FHR4 (kit - entire assembly)
  • 4T7KV (backplane and cage, the bulk of the assembly)
  • NF4JP (SAS connections)
  • 7TG54 (power connections)
  • 8K3F3 (low-profile heatsink)
  • FJ21V (low-profile hard drive caddies)

If you can find the entire kit, it should ship with 2x heatsinks, 4x caddies and 4x HDD blanks. At time of writing, the price for the kit was ~ USD $125 before tax and shipping.

I assembled my kit via eBay with individual components - $63 for the backplane, cage, and cabling; $30 for 4x drive caddies; $11 for one low-profile heatsink. Total saved was around $15-20 and keeps those kits on the market for people with dual-CPU systems.

My R730xd is a storage array, not much compute happening. I don’t expect heat to be an issue.

Disk shelves

You can expand your storage further without getting more servers. Look into NetApp and Dell MD series disk shelves. This isn’t something I have personal experience with because I don’t need that many disks.