TrueNAS Build: PowerEdge R730xd Parts List

Prices updated 2026-08-14

Why this platform

Density is the reason. Dell documents the R730xd in a twelve-bay 3.5-inch configuration, which is where the large-capacity drives that make a bulk array affordable actually live — and a SAS backplane in that chassis accepts cheap SATA capacity drives as readily as SAS ones. The 2U form factor leaves room for the airflow twelve drives need, which the 1U machines in the same family do not have.

Full bay configurations, chassis pricing, noise and management-licensing detail for this machine are on the PowerEdge R730xd buyer's guide, and what fits each backplane is on its drive compatibility page.

Pick a different build if…

• Proxmox on an R740 — if you want virtual machines more than you want bulk storage.
• the DL380 Gen9 media build — if your budget is tighter and the workload is mostly streaming.
• a purpose-built NAS device — if noise or power draw rules out rack hardware entirely.

The parts list

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.

1. The chassis

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.

2. Drives (12 needed)

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.

3. Carriers (12 needed)

At $6.80 per carrier, filling 12 bays costs about $82 — 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.

4. Host bus adapter

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.

5. Memory (64 GB target)

TrueNAS's own guide puts the floor at 8 GB for up to eight drives and adds 1 GB per drive beyond that, which lands a twelve-bay machine at 12 GB as a documented minimum. That is a floor, not a target. 64 GB is the figure this build plans around because ECC memory for this platform is cheap on the used market and ARC is the single thing that most improves how a ZFS pool feels to use — but the honest framing is that anything from 32 GB up is a working machine, and the documented minimum is far lower than the internet usually claims.

The cheapest route to 64 GB right now is 1 × 64 GB modules at about $276. 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 R730 · memory finder

On how much you actually need: TrueNAS's guide states a floor of 8 GB for up to eight drives, plus 1 GB per drive beyond that. It does not state the widely repeated “1 GB per TB” rule anywhere. See the TrueNAS Hardware Guide.

Rails, and what we cannot price

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.

What TrueNAS actually requires, quoted

Two things about this build are not matters of opinion, and both are stated in TrueNAS's own hardware guide rather than inferred by us.

The first is the storage controller. TrueNAS's guide says plainly that “ZFS and TrueNAS provide a built-in RAID that protects your data better than any hardware RAID card”, and instructs that where a hardware RAID card supports HBA mode you should “not use their RAID facility”. That is why this parts list includes a host bus adapter rather than treating whatever card came with the machine as adequate. The guide is also specific about the cost of getting it wrong: hardware RAID cards can mask disk serial numbers and SMART health information, which is exactly the data ZFS needs to tell you a drive is dying.

The second is memory, and here the documentation is far more relaxed than the folklore. The widely repeated “1 GB of RAM per TB of storage” rule does not appear in TrueNAS's hardware guide at all. What the guide actually says, verbatim, is: “You should have at least 8 GB of RAM for basic TrueNAS operations with up to eight drives”, and “Add 1 GB for each drive added after eight to benefit most use cases”. The per-TB numbers it does give are conditional: 5 GB per TB only for deduplication, which most home builds should simply not enable, and roughly 1 GB per 50 GB of L2ARC. If you have been putting off a build because you believed you needed 100 GB of memory for a 100 TB pool, you were following a rule of thumb from around 2012, not the vendor's documentation.

Where the folklore has a point is that more ARC makes a pool feel faster, and memory for this platform is inexpensive second-hand. So spend where it is cheap and stop worrying about a threshold that was never official.

Quotations from the TrueNAS Hardware Guide.

Where to go next

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