Same generation, same processors, same twenty-four DIMM slots. This comparison is not about the platform at all - it is about the height of the box, and that single dimension changes what the machine can do and how it sounds doing it.
Prices updated
| PowerEdge R630 | PowerEdge R730 | |
|---|---|---|
| Generation | 13th generation | 13th generation |
| Platform | Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 / v4 | Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 / v4 |
| Chassis height | 1U rack | 2U rack |
| Max documented bays | 24 | 16 |
| Documented configs | 3 | 2 |
| Chassis, live | $381 | $499 |
| Memory, cheapest $/GB | $4.31 | $4.31 |
| Remote management | iDRAC8 ships in three tiers | iDRAC8 ships in three tiers |
Prices are live from our catalogue. Where a chassis shows a band rather than a figure, we hold no verified Amazon listing for it and the range is a dated estimate rather than a quote.
Dell documents the R630 in 8 and 10-bay 2.5-inch configurations, with a 24-bay 1.8-inch variant that is a curiosity rather than an option today. There is no 3.5-inch configuration. Not a rare one, not an expensive one - none, because a 1U chassis is not tall enough for a large-format drive.
That single fact settles most of this comparison. The large-capacity drives that make bulk storage affordable are only manufactured in 3.5-inch. If storage capacity is why you are shopping, the R630 cannot do the job at any price, and no caddy or adapter changes the height of the chassis.
The R730 gives you either eight large-format bays or sixteen small-format ones, and the R730xd extends that to twelve large-format. That is the range of choice you are buying with the extra rack unit.
The other thing 1U takes away is card slots and the height of the cards that fit in them. A 1U machine takes low-profile cards only, which rules out a great many GPUs entirely and means every add-in card purchase has to check the bracket as well as the slot.
For a storage or virtualisation build that mostly means one thing: your host bus adapter must be a low-profile card, and cards frequently ship with the wrong bracket fitted. It is a trivial part that stalls a build for a week.
This is the part people underestimate, and it is community knowledge rather than a vendor specification, so we are labelling it as such.
A 1U chassis cools with small-diameter fans, and small fans move air by spinning faster. Owner reports on ServeTheHome and r/homelab consistently describe 1U machines of this era as louder than their 2U siblings under comparable load, and describe the noise as higher-pitched and more difficult to live near. That consistency across reports is the finding; we publish no decibel figures for either machine because we have not measured any and Dell does not state any for a used configuration.
The practical read: if the machine is going in a rack in a room you do not occupy, this is a non-issue and the smaller box is genuinely appealing. If it is going anywhere near people, the 2U machine is the more forgiving choice and the extra rack unit is cheap insurance.
It is easy to write 1U off after the section above, and that would be wrong. There are real cases where the smaller machine wins.
If you are rack-constrained rather than budget-constrained - a half-height rack, a shared colocation unit, a cabinet with three usable slots - then two R630s in the space of one R730 is more machine, not less. If the workload is compute or memory rather than storage, the R630's twenty-four DIMM slots are identical to its larger sibling's and the drive bays you are giving up were never going to be used. And if the storage is going to live elsewhere on the network anyway, bays in this box are irrelevant.
The R630 is also frequently cheaper, because the used market prices bays. If you genuinely do not need them, you are being offered the same platform for less money.
Whichever way this comparison goes, it is worth keeping the numbers in proportion. The gap between these two options is usually a couple of hundred dollars. Filling the machine with drives is usually several times that, and it is the same purchase either way.
That has a practical consequence for how you should weigh this decision. Agonising over the chassis while the drives dominate the budget is optimising the smaller line — and if the cheaper option leaves enough headroom for one more drive, that extra drive will change how the finished machine feels far more than the platform generation will. The exception is a build that is genuinely compute-bound rather than storage-bound, where the platform is the thing you are buying and the drives are incidental.
The other thing worth pricing before you commit is what the machine needs beyond the chassis: a carrier for every drive, and a storage controller that suits your filesystem. Neither is expensive individually and together they routinely add more than the price difference this page is about. Our build calculator prices the whole list for either option so you can compare finished machines rather than bare chassis, which is the comparison that actually matters.
On condition: recertified enterprise drives are the normal supply for builds like these and usually the right buy — 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 inherited powered-on hours. The table below shows condition alongside price so the comparison stays honest rather than floating used drives to the top as though they were equivalent to new ones. For a parity array, check the recording technology as well — no parity level rescues an array built on shingled drives.
8 in-stock listings · conventionally recorded, 3.5in, ranked by cost per terabyte · 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 |
| MDD 6TB SAS 12G 7200RPM MD6TSAS12872E | 6TB | SAS-12G | CMR | REFURB | $18.33 | $110 | Buy |
| HP 695842-001 4TB SAS 6G LFF 695842-001 | 4TB | SAS-6G | CMR | NEW | $19.67 | $79 | Buy |
PowerEdge R630 buyer's guide · PowerEdge R730 buyer's guide · Complete build guides · Price your own configuration · Where to buy
Other comparisons: PowerEdge R730 vs PowerEdge R740 · ProLiant DL380 Gen9 vs ProLiant DL380 Gen10 · 12-bay LFF vs 24-bay SFF
It depends on the workload, and the honest framing is that this is a budget question more than a capability one. The table above shows current chassis and memory costs from our live data. For storage-first builds the cheaper machine usually wins, because the drives cost the same either way and the money saved buys another one. For virtualisation the newer platform earns its premium.
Broadly yes, where the bay form factor matches. Both machines' SAS backplanes accept SATA drives as well as SAS, which is the fact that makes filling a used enterprise chassis affordable. What differs is which backplane configurations each was built in, and that is documented per model on their individual pages.
For a storage build, usually not. A pool of spinning disks is not waiting on memory bandwidth or platform generation, and the older machine leaves budget for drives. For a virtualisation host running many concurrent workloads, the newer platform and its faster memory are worth having. Buy the generation your workload actually notices.
We publish no decibel figures for any machine on this site, because we have not measured any and vendors do not state them for used configurations. What is consistent in owner reports is that 1U chassis are louder than 2U ones of the same era — small fans move air by spinning faster — and that hardware the management controller does not recognise raises the fan floor on all of them. That is community reporting and we label it as such. Our noise page covers the landscape and the mitigation options honestly.
The tiering model is the same across generations and vendors: the virtual console with virtual media, which is the feature that makes a machine administrable from elsewhere, sits behind the licensed tier rather than the free one. What varies is the interface generation. The buying advice does not change — ask the seller which tier is active on the specific machine, in writing, because it does not appear in a listing photograph.
Bay and backplane data comes from the vendors' own documentation — Dell technical guides and owner's manuals, HPE QuickSpecs, Lenovo setup guides — cited on each model's page. Prices come from our live catalogue and refresh every few hours. Anything drawn from community reporting rather than a vendor document is labelled as such, including the fan-behaviour observations, because a forum consensus and a specification are different kinds of claim.