PowerEdge R720 Buyer's Guide - Parts & Prices

Every configuration, with its own table: PowerEdge R720 drive compatibility

Memory

The R720 is a DDR3 platform. We track DDR4 and DDR5 server memory and hold no DDR3 catalogue, so this page shows no memory picks rather than showing you the wrong ones. DDR3 RDIMMs for this generation are abundant and cheap on the used market - that is genuinely part of the R720's appeal - but you will be buying them somewhere other than here. Browse our server memory catalogue.

What the PowerEdge R720 is, and where it sits

The PowerEdge R720 is a 2U rack Dell PowerEdge machine built on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 / E5-2600 v2 platform, and it belongs to Dell's 12th generation line. It reached the second-hand market the way all enterprise hardware does: in bulk, at the end of a lease or a refresh cycle, from organisations that bought it new for a great deal of money and now want it off the floor. That is the whole reason it is interesting to a homelab or a small office. You are not buying a cheap server. You are buying an expensive server late.

What makes this particular machine worth a page is its storage. In its 8 x 3.5in LFF configuration it carries 8 front bays, and across every configuration Dell documents it tops out at 16. Bays are the thing a used server gives you that a desktop or a small NAS cannot, and they are the reason people put a two-decade-old-sounding machine in a cupboard and run it for years. A 16-bay chassis with a SAS backplane will accept cheap SATA capacity drives, and that combination — enterprise chassis, consumer drive prices — is the entire economic case.

It is also worth being clear about what you are taking on. This is rack hardware designed for a room with its own cooling and its own acoustics budget, and it was designed by people who assumed nobody would ever have to sleep near it. The four sections below cover the four things that actually catch buyers out — noise, power, the storage controller, and remote-management licensing — and none of them are reasons not to buy. They are reasons to know what you are buying.

Which one of these should you actually buy?

Dell sold several machines in this family and the used market carries all of them at once, often at overlapping prices, which is how people end up with the wrong one. The short version for the PowerEdge R720: it is a 2U machine, which is where the drive bays are. If you want density in a short rack, the 1U siblings are cheaper but carry far fewer disks. Compare it against PowerEdge R730xd, PowerEdge R730, PowerEdge R740xd and PowerEdge R740.

The four things that catch people out

1. Noise

Fan behaviour is the single most-cited ownership complaint for rack PowerEdge hardware in home and small-office use. Two triggers come up repeatedly: a PCIe card the iDRAC does not recognise, which raises the baseline fan floor, and higher-wattage or non-Dell drives. Community-documented IPMI fan-control procedures exist and are discussed at length on ServeTheHome and r/homelab. We do not reproduce them: they are unofficial, they vary by firmware revision, and a mistake runs the machine hot. Read the discussion, understand the risk, and decide for yourself. We publish no decibel or idle-wattage figure because we have not measured one and Dell does not state one for a used configuration.

The practical buying advice that follows from this is simple and does not require any unofficial tinkering: think about where the machine will live before you think about which one to buy. A garage, a basement, a proper rack in a room you do not work in — any of those, and this is a non-issue. A cupboard off a bedroom, and it is the thing you will regret. That decision costs nothing to make now and is expensive to reverse once a 70-pound chassis is in the house.

2. Power

Power is the cost people forget to price, and unlike the purchase it repeats every month. A dual-socket machine of this generation idles at a level that is a real line on a household bill, and it does that whether or not you are using it. We do not publish an idle-wattage figure for the PowerEdge R720, because we have not measured one and Dell does not state one for a used configuration — the number depends on which processors are fitted, how many DIMMs are populated, how many drives are spinning and which power supplies are installed. Anyone quoting you a single confident watt figure for “an PowerEdge R720” is quoting a machine, not the machine you are buying.

What you can do is price it properly before you commit. Take your electricity rate, multiply by 24 and by 365, and apply it to a range rather than a point — then decide whether the answer changes your mind. For most people running one machine it does not. For people planning to run three, it usually does, and that is exactly the calculation that should happen before the purchase rather than after the first bill. Our calculators cover the storage side of the same question.

3. The storage controller, and whether it will run ZFS

The R720's factory controllers are PERC H310, H710 and H710P. The H310 in particular is the card most often discussed for pass-through use, and community crossflash procedures for it are widely published. We do not reproduce them: crossflashing is unofficial, it can brick the card, and it is not something to attempt on the strength of a summary. If you want pass-through behaviour, the low-risk route is to buy a machine that already has a non-RAID HBA in it.

The full explanation, and which specific cards ship ready versus needing a firmware change, is on our IT mode guide — and the card decoder lists every controller we track with live prices.

This matters more than any other single specification if you intend to run TrueNAS, Proxmox with ZFS, Unraid or anything else that wants to manage disks itself. Those systems want to see each physical drive, read its SMART data and handle redundancy in software. A RAID controller in its normal mode hides all of that behind virtual disks, and the failure mode is not a crash — it is that everything appears to work while your filesystem is blind to the health of the hardware underneath it. Settle this question with the seller before money changes hands, because it is a much cheaper question to ask than to answer later.

4. Remote management licensing

iDRAC7 is tiered as Basic, Express and Enterprise, with full virtual console and virtual media in Enterprise. On a machine this old the licence question matters more, not less: it is the cheapest way to end up with a server you cannot administer without standing in front of it.

The reason this deserves its own section rather than a footnote is that remote management is most of the point of enterprise hardware for a home user. A machine you can power-cycle, reinstall and rescue from a laptop is a machine that can live somewhere inconvenient. A machine without that is one you will be carrying a monitor and keyboard to. The hardware is present either way; what varies is the licence, and the licence is not visible in a listing photograph.

Choosing the configuration before you choose the seller

The PowerEdge R720 is available in configurations that take 3.5" drives, which is what you want if capacity per pound is the goal. Large-capacity spinning disks are only sold in that form factor, and no adapter meaningfully changes that in a hot-swap bay — a caddy that lets a 2.5" drive sit in a 3.5" bay exists, but the reverse does not.

One configuration of this model is SATA only. The entry configuration, and the one trap on this model: Dell states four-hard-drive systems take 3.5in SATA drives only and run software RAID. Slots 4 through 7 are blanks that do not accept drives. A SAS drive will not work here. A SAS drive is keyed differently and will not work in it. This is the most expensive mistake available on this machine, because SAS enterprise drives are often the cheapest capacity on the used market and it is entirely natural to buy a stack of them before checking which backplane you have.

Right now our catalogue carries 20 in-stock 3.5" drives and 16 in-stock 2.5" drives that fit machines of this class. The full breakdown, config by config, is on the PowerEdge R720 drive compatibility page.

Complete builds and comparisons

We have no complete build guide on this specific machine yet, but the build guides on its siblings translate directly, and the build calculator will price this model with your own configuration.

To price a configuration of your own, the build calculator opens preselected on this model.

Verifying one on arrival

Used enterprise hardware is generally sound — it was built to a standard a desktop is not, and most of it has spent its life in a temperature-controlled room. But it arrives without a warranty conversation, so the first hour matters. Work through this before the return window closes rather than before the first weekend project:

• It POSTs, and it POSTs clean. Not just “it turns on” — watch the whole power-on self test and read any amber lights or panel codes rather than assuming they clear.
• Every bay detects a drive. Move one known-good drive through all 8 bays if you have to. A dead backplane channel is invisible until the day you fill the chassis, and it is not a repair you want to discover six months in.
• Remote management is reachable, and you know its tier. Get to the login page, get in, and then try the remote console specifically — that is the feature that sits behind the licence.
• Both power supplies are present and both work. Pull one at a time under load. Redundancy you have not tested is not redundancy, and sellers frequently ship these with one live PSU and one blank.
• Count the caddies. Drive carriers are sold separately, they are model-specific, and a “16-bay” machine that arrives with two caddies is a machine you will spend real money finishing.
• Check the memory the system actually sees against what the listing claimed, in the management interface rather than in the operating system.

Apply the same discipline to any drives that came with it. Bundled disks in a used server are usually the drives the previous owner had least reason to keep, and they arrive with an unknown number of powered-on hours. Our guide to recertified and refurbished drives covers what to check and what the numbers mean, and it applies to bundled drives exactly as it applies to bought ones. The full first-hour procedure is on verify on arrival, and the licensing question above is covered in depth on iDRAC and iLO licensing.

Caddies and carriers

Drive carriers are specific to a chassis generation and form factor, and they are not interchangeable across generations even within one vendor's line. We do not publish carrier part numbers for the PowerEdge R720. The reason is deliberate: Dell's own documentation for this machine describes carriers generically and does not list part numbers, and the numbers that circulate on forums are frequently right for one generation and wrong for the next. A wrong caddy is a real cost and a genuinely annoying return. Buy carriers matched to the specific model and form factor, from a seller who states which generation they fit, and where you can, buy the machine with its caddies already in it — a chassis that arrives fully populated with carriers is worth paying a premium for.

Live prices for the carriers this machine takes, including the multi-packs that make filling a chassis affordable, are on our Dell 11th/12th generation carrier page, alongside the compatibility list and what to check when they arrive.