This is the first question almost everybody asks, and the honest answer is that it is a budget question far more than a capability one. Both are two-socket 2U machines with twenty-four DIMM slots and comparable drive-bay options. What separates them is a platform generation, an iDRAC generation, and a price gap that has narrowed but not closed.
Prices updated
| PowerEdge R730 | PowerEdge R740 | |
|---|---|---|
| Generation | 13th generation | 14th generation |
| Platform | Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 / v4 | Intel Xeon Scalable (1st / 2nd generation) |
| Chassis height | 2U rack | 2U rack |
| Max documented bays | 16 | 16 |
| Documented configs | 2 | 2 |
| Chassis, live | $499 | $1,595 |
| Memory, cheapest $/GB | $4.31 | $8.06 |
| Remote management | iDRAC8 ships in three tiers | iDRAC9 is tiered the same way: Basic, Express, and Enterprise, with the full virtual console and virtual media sitting in Enterprise (and a later Datacenter tier above it) |
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.
The R730 is Dell's 13th generation, built on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 and v4 platform. The R740 is the 14th, built on Xeon Scalable. That is a real generational step and it brings a newer memory subsystem with it, which is where the practical difference shows up: the R740's platform runs DDR4 at higher speeds than the R730's does.
For a storage box that difference is close to irrelevant, because a pool of spinning disks is not waiting on memory bandwidth. For a virtualisation host running many concurrent workloads it matters more, and it is the main reason to reach for the newer machine.
Drive bays are broadly comparable and the xd variants of each are where the density lives - twelve large-format bays on both the R730xd and the R740xd. If storage is the goal, the choice between generations barely touches the thing you care about.
This is where the comparison becomes concrete rather than architectural, because both machines take DDR4 and the used market prices the two platforms' modules differently. The table above shows what compatible memory currently costs per gigabyte for each, drawn from our live catalogue rather than from a list price.
The pattern that generally holds: modules for the older platform are cheaper per gigabyte, because there are more of them in circulation and they came out of machines being scrapped rather than machines being refreshed. If your build is memory-hungry and generation-indifferent - a large-memory workload, a big ARC - that price difference can outweigh the platform advantage entirely.
Both machines tier their remote management the same way, and both put the feature you actually want - the virtual console with virtual media - behind the licensed tier rather than the free one. That is a vendor fact and it applies equally to each.
The generational difference is in the interface rather than the licensing model. iDRAC9 is the newer implementation with a more modern web interface; iDRAC8's console has aged less gracefully. Neither changes the central buying advice, which is to ask the seller which licence tier is active on the specific machine and get the answer in writing. A machine with iDRAC hardware and no Enterprise licence is a machine you will be carrying a monitor to.
One difference is worth flagging carefully because it is community knowledge rather than a vendor specification, and it cuts against the newer machine.
The IPMI-based fan-control approaches that homelab owners use to quieten 13th-generation PowerEdge machines are widely reported not to work the same way on 14th-generation hardware, where the firmware handles fan control differently. This comes up repeatedly on ServeTheHome and r/homelab, and it is the single most-cited practical regret among people who bought an R740 expecting to quieten it the way they quietened an R730.
We are relaying that as community reporting because that is exactly what it is - it is not in any Dell document, the behaviour varies by firmware revision, and we have not tested it. We do not reproduce any fan-control procedure for either machine. If quiet operation is a hard requirement and you were planning to rely on community fan control to achieve it, read the current discussions before choosing the newer platform, because the assumption may not hold.
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 R730 buyer's guide · PowerEdge R740 buyer's guide · Complete build guides · Price your own configuration · Where to buy
Other comparisons: ProLiant DL380 Gen9 vs ProLiant DL380 Gen10 · PowerEdge R630 vs PowerEdge R730 · 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.