Dell R720 vs R730: The 12G-to-13G 2U Step

The 2U version of the 12G-versus-13G question carries higher stakes than the 1U one: these are the machines that end up holding storage pools, hypervisor estates and every mixed workload a small operation owns. The R720 sits at scrap-adjacent prices; the R730 costs meaningfully more and remains the market's default 2U. The gap is worth a careful look precisely because both are genuinely good machines.

Shared bones

Two sockets, 24 DIMM slots, 2U cooling that stays civil, proper riser-based PCIe expansion, hot-plug everything, and bay layouts from 8LFF to 16SFF (plus the storage-heavy xd variants on both sides). A rack five meters away cannot tell them apart. The differences are generational, not architectural.

Where the R730 pulls ahead

Memory economics: DDR4 vs DDR3 — cheaper per gigabyte on today's used market, denser modules, faster clocks, and a parts pool shared with everything newer. For the RAM-heavy roles 2U machines live for, this alone settles most purchases. Compute: E5 v3/v4 with up to 22 cores and better per-core throughput vs v1/v2's 12-core ceiling. Hypervisor runway: 13G caught the ESXi 7 train; 12G did not. Management and efficiency: iDRAC8 with a modern console, and lower idle draw per unit of work — a 24/7 machine notices.

Where the R720 still earns a slot

Fixed-role capacity at absurd prices. An R720xd 12LFF as a backup repository or media pool — a role that is 90% drive cost anyway — delivers identical bays and airflow for a fraction of the chassis money, and its CPU/RAM ceilings are irrelevant to the job. Same logic for a lab storage node, a NVR target, a scratch render sink. The discipline required: buy it full, because upgrading DDR3 or v2 CPUs is spending on a closed platform.

The arithmetic worth doing

Price the configured machines, not the chassis: R720 + the DDR3 you will add + the higher wattage over two years, versus R730 + cheap DDR4 at target capacity. For anything beyond fixed-role duty, the R730 wins that spreadsheet more often than its sticker suggests — and resells years later into a market that has already forgotten its predecessor.

Verdict

Growth, virtualization, general duty, first serious server: R730, without agonizing. Bulk bays for a fixed storage job at minimum spend: R720xd, bought full, run until the fans quit. Both are honest machines; the mistake is buying the cheap one and then paying to make it the expensive one.