Design
The R730 follows the traditional rack-mount server design with a heavy, robust and extremely well engineered all-metal chassis designed to take up two rack units (sliding rails are included) with a lift-off lid for ease of access. Most of the components are then colour coded - blue to mark those that can only be changed when powered down and a light red (Dell calls it terracotta) for those that can be hot-swapped.
A pair of redundant power supplies slide in at the back. These were rated at 750 Watts on the server we looked at although higher wattages are available to match the processor and storage combination chosen.
Each power supply also has its own fan although most of the cooling is handled by a bank of six fans in the middle of the chassis. These can be hot-swapped and the complete array lifted out for ease of access to the rest of the server.
Some care is needed when it comes to storage configuration as, although the R730 can be equipped with small form factor drive bays to take sixteen 2.5-inch disks or SSDs, this has to be specified up front and the review server had metalwork for just eight with no upgrade available to add to this later. A chassis to take eight 3.5-inch disks is also available.