A virtualisation host rather than a storage box. The R740 is the newer platform of the two Dell machines most homelabs consider, and for running many virtual machines at once that generational gap matters more than it does for a NAS. This page prices the whole parts list live: a PowerEdge R740 in its 8 x 3.5in LFF configuration, 8 drives and 8 carriers, an IT-mode host bus adapter, and 128 GB of ECC memory.
Prices updated
Both halves of this are live prices, so the total is a real figure rather than an estimate — but it still excludes processors (which arrive fitted and which we do not price), rails and cables.
The R740 sits on Dell's 14th-generation Xeon Scalable platform, a generation newer than the R730 line, with iDRAC9 rather than iDRAC8. For a machine whose job is to run a lot of concurrent workloads, the newer platform is the more comfortable long-term choice, and its memory subsystem is the one you will be filling. Eight large-format bays is plenty when the storage is backing virtual machines rather than being the product.
Full bay configurations, chassis pricing, noise and management-licensing detail for this machine are on the PowerEdge R740 buyer's guide, and what fits each backplane is on its drive compatibility page.
Every table below is live. Where a part class has nothing in stock the table says so rather than quietly disappearing, because a parts list with a silent gap is worse than one with an admitted one.
We hold 3 verified Amazon listings for this machine. Read the configuration in the title rather than the model number — two machines with the same model can differ several-fold in price on processors, memory and how many carriers are included.
| Dell PowerEdge R740 8-Bay SFF Server 2.10Ghz 44-Core 288GB RAM + Rails Host (Ren… | $1,594.95 | Refurb | Buy |
| Dell PowerEdge R740 16-Bay SFF Server 2.70Ghz 36-Core 128GB RAM 800GB SSDs Rails… | $1,797.78 | Refurb | Buy |
| Dell PowerEdge R740 16-Bay SFF Server 3.40Ghz 12-Core 128GB RAM + 18TB Storage (… | $1,977.8 | Refurb | Buy |
6 in-stock listings · 8 needed for this build · ranked by live cost per tb, refreshed every few hours
| Drive | Capacity | Interface | Recording | Condition | $/TB | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HP 695842-001 4TB SAS 6G 695842-001 | 4TB | SAS-6G | CMR | NEW | $14.00 | $56 | Buy |
| HP ST31000640SS 1TB SAS ST31000640SS | 1TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $14.99 | $15 | Buy |
| HGST HUS724030ALS640 3TB SAS 6G HUS724030ALS640 | 3TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $15.13 | $45 | Buy |
| Seagate 3TB Enterprise Capacity SAS 6G ST3000NM0023 | 3TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $17.98 | $54 | Buy |
| HGST HUS726040ALS210 4TB SAS 12G HUS726040ALS210 | 4TB | SAS-12G | CMR | REFURB | $18.13 | $73 | Buy |
| Dell NWCCG 6TB SAS 6G NL Renewed NWCCG | 6TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $18.33 | $110 | Buy |
Conventional recording only. A shingled drive in a parity array turns a rebuild that should take hours into one that takes days, and the array is at its most vulnerable for the whole of that window — see our CMR drive list. For condition, recertified enterprise drives are the normal supply for a build like this; our recertified guide covers what the grades mean.
4 in-stock listings · 8 needed · ranked per caddy, not per pack · ranked by price per unit, not pack price · refreshed every few hours
| Listing | Pack | Pack price | Per caddy | Condition | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 Pack 3.5" SAS SATA Hard Drive Tray Caddy Replacement for Dell PowerEdge | 5× | $33.99 | $6.80 | NEW | Buy |
| DRIVECADDY 3-Pack 3.5" LFF Caddy Tray - fits Dell PowerEdge 17-14th Gen | 3× | $23.00 | $7.67 | NEW | Buy |
| 2.5 to 3.5 Hard Drive Adapter 9W8C4 Y004G WWGPK SSD Bracket Adapter Compatible… | single | $7.99 | $7.99 | NEW | Buy |
| 3.5" HDD Drive Tray Caddy Replacement for Dell G14 G15 POWEREDGE R640 R740 R74… | single | $9.29 | $9.29 | NEW | Buy |
At $6.80 per carrier, filling 8 bays costs about $54 — a line most people leave out of the budget entirely, and one of the two reasons a cheap chassis turns out not to be cheap. Compatibility, part-number provenance and what to check on arrival are on the Dell 13th/14th generation 3.5" LFF page.
5 in-stock listings · cards that present drives directly out of the box · ranked by price · refreshed every few hours
| Listing | Price | Condition | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0P2R3R DELL PERC HBA330 12G Mini Mono SAS/SATA RAID Controller | $20.00 | NEW | Buy |
| SAS HBA Card Compatible with LSI 9300-8i & D3307 IT Mode HBA Controller | $43.24 | USED | Buy |
| KCMconmey LSI 9207-8i Controller HBA Card, LSI 2308 SATA SAS Host Bus Adapter.… | $49.99 | NEW | Buy |
| HP H240 Smart Host Bus Adapter Storage Controller Plug-In Card Low Profile (72… | $50.00 | USED | Buy |
| Gugxiom LSI SAS 9300-16I HBA Card, 16 Port 12Gbps HBA Controller | $68.44 | USED | Buy |
These are host bus adapters by design rather than RAID cards flashed to behave like them, so there is no firmware step and no seller claim to verify. The full decoder, including the cards that do need flashing and the counterfeit checks worth running, is on the IT mode guide.
Memory is the binding constraint on how many virtual machines a host runs, more than cores are. 128 GB is the figure this build plans around because it is where DDR4 on the used market is cheapest per gigabyte in quantity and it comfortably runs a serious lab. The platform supports far more; there is no technical reason to stop at this number, only an economic one.
| Module | Price | $/GB | For 128GB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A-Tech 64GB RDIMM | $516 | $8.06 | 2 × = $1032 | Buy |
| A-Tech 64GB RDIMM | $530 | $8.28 | 2 × = $1060 | Buy |
| A-Tech 32GB RDIMM | $277 | $8.66 | 4 × = $1108 | Buy |
| A-Tech 32GB RDIMM | $284 | $8.87 | 4 × = $1135 | Buy |
The cheapest route to 128 GB right now is 2 × 64 GB modules at about $1,032. Populate the slots in the order the vendor documents — a badly populated configuration runs slower than the parts you paid for, and on these platforms that is a real effect rather than a rounding error. Full compatibility rules and population guidance: memory for the R740 · memory finder
Rails are the part nobody remembers until the machine is on the floor and the rack is on the wall. We do not track rail kits and we are not going to quote a part number for one, because rail kits are chassis-generation and rack-depth specific and a wrong kit is a bulky, expensive return. Ask the seller whether rails are included — many listings include them and many do not, and it is a question worth one line before purchase.
We also do not price processors. Used servers overwhelmingly arrive with them fitted, so the chassis figure above is for a configured machine; read the listing to see which are in it. If you intend to upgrade later, price that separately, because we have no data to offer you there and inventing a figure would be worse than admitting the gap.
Proxmox does not impose a storage layout, and the community argues about this more than almost anything else. We are not going to pick for you, because the right answer genuinely depends on what you are doing. What we can do is set out what each choice commits you to.
ZFS on the host is the option that gives you snapshots, checksumming and replication between nodes, and it is why this parts list includes a host bus adapter rather than a RAID card — ZFS wants the disks directly, exactly as it does under TrueNAS. The cost is memory: ARC will use what you give it, which is one more argument for filling the DIMM slots on a platform where memory is cheap.
LVM on hardware RAID is the traditional arrangement and it is entirely coherent. The RAID card owns redundancy, Proxmox sees one device, and you get a battery-backed write cache that ZFS deliberately does not use. If you go this way, the PERC that came with the machine is an asset rather than a problem, and you should not buy an HBA at all.
What you should not do is combine them: putting ZFS on top of a hardware RAID volume gives you the protection of neither. ZFS cannot repair what it cannot see individual devices for, and the RAID card cannot help with the corruption ZFS was there to catch. Pick a layer to own redundancy and let it.
A third pattern worth knowing is a small mirror of SSDs for the virtual machines and a larger spinning-disk pool for bulk data. That is the layout most eight-bay builds of this kind converge on, and it is why the drive table below is worth reading alongside our enterprise SSD pages rather than instead of them.
Price your own variant in the build calculator · Where to buy the chassis · What to check when it arrives · The other build guides · Add 10GbE to this build
We publish it as two numbers rather than one, because only part of it is a live price. The parts we track - drives, carriers, memory and the host bus adapter - currently sum to $1,554. The chassis is a live Amazon listing at $1,594.95. That puts a realistic total at $3,149. Collapsing an estimate band into a single figure would invent precision we do not have.
No, and that is a deliberate gap. We do not track CPU prices, so quoting one would mean making a number up. Used servers overwhelmingly arrive with processors already fitted, which is why the chassis figure above is for a configured machine rather than a bare board - read the listing to see which processors are in it. If you intend to upgrade them later, price that separately.
This build fills 8 of the chassis's bays, so the parts list prices 8 drives and 8 carriers. Empty bays keep their blanks rather than sitting open, because the cooling design assumes the airflow path stays closed. If you plan to fill fewer bays now and grow later, scale both numbers together - and buy carriers in the multi-pack size that matches the final count, because per-unit price falls sharply with pack size.
For this build, yes. TrueNAS's own hardware guide says ZFS "provides a built-in RAID that protects your data better than any hardware RAID card", and instructs you not to use a RAID card's RAID facility where an HBA mode exists. A RAID controller hides per-disk SMART data and serial numbers, which is exactly what the filesystem needs to detect and repair problems. The cheapest IT-native card in our catalogue is priced in the list above; our IT mode guide explains which cards need no firmware work at all.
Almost certainly, and most people building this should. Recertified enterprise drives are the normal supply for a build like this - the same drives at a fraction of the price, typically rated for a higher duty cycle than the consumer drives they undercut. What you trade is warranty length and the powered-on hours you inherit. The drive table above shows condition alongside price so the comparison stays honest rather than floating used drives to the top as though they were equivalent.
No. We price hardware and link the platforms' own documentation for installation, because their docs are maintained and ours would not be. What this page is for is the shopping list and the arithmetic - which parts, how many, what they cost today, and where the number is an estimate rather than a quote.