Massively Expandable
Dell packed a ton of computing power into the R720's 2U chassis compared with the R710. The R720 can accept as many as 16 internal hard drives for a maximum hard drive capacity of 24 TB (compared with eight drives and 18TB), one full-length, full-height x16 PCIe slot (shown, vs. none), plus three x8 slots (vs. two). Add Dell's four optional hot-plug PCIe SSDs with dual RAID controller capability and the R720 alone is capable of multi-tiered, front-accessible storage.
As tested, the PowerEdge R720 included two 1-Gb and two 10-Gb Ethernet ports, 128 GB of DDR3 1600 MHz SDRAM, and is expandable to 768 GB. It also included an 8 GB iDRAC SD card and 1 GB redundant SD card, a PERC H710P mini RAID controller, and an 8-port disk backplane with five of its 16 drive bays occupied by 300 GB, 2.5-inch 10k SAS 6 Gbps drives. Total list price as configured: $13,759.
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