Expansion
This is a small, squat machine that's big on versatility. A blue plastic tab on the back of the system pushes down to let the side panel ease free, while three tabs on the front section allow that slab of plastic to pop away from the Optiplex's metal skeleton.
There are more blue tabs on the inside. One allows the sturdy storage cage to peel away from the motherboard until it sits almost perpendicular to the board. That position means the internals are laid bare: the hard disk sits in a bay that's covered with the now familiar blue plastic, and the slimline optical drive is just as accessible. The bottom of the case has two spare 2.5in bays with power cables ready to attach to SSDs or laptop hard drives.

There are three memory slots that can take twelve extra gigabytes of DDR3. There are two SATA ports free, one PCI-Express x1 and one x4 slot a piece as well as single PCI-Express x16 and PCI slots.
All of that means there's plenty of room to add more memory, storage and numerous expansion cards and Dell has cleverly made sure the storage cage makes way so large graphics cards can be added without clashing with metal elsewhere.