The Dell PowerEdge R350 8-Bay 2.5" is the small-form-factor configuration of Dell's 15th-generation entry single-socket platform. It pairs a single Intel Xeon E-2300 (Rocket Lake) processor with eight 2.5" hot-plug SFF drive bays in a 1U chassis, on the same production-grade R350 internals as the 4-Bay: dual hot-plug redundant power supplies, three PCIe slots with a dedicated controller position, and a rear hot-plug boot card. The difference is the front bays. Eight small-format bays instead of four large-format trades capacity per drive for spindle count and SSD density, which is the right trade when I/O throughput and drive count matter more than raw terabytes.

This is a 15th-gen platform, and we sell it as Surplus New or Refurbished rather than factory-new. Surplus New means a genuinely unused unit drawn from excess channel inventory: never deployed, but outside Dell's current new-sales channel, which is why it is priced below Dell-direct new. Refurbished units are previously deployed servers we have tested and reconditioned. Both carry the Wholesale Servers warranty described below; tell us which condition you need at quote time and we price accordingly.

To spec a build, call 1-800-778-1545 and a technician will size the configuration with you: CPU, memory, drives, controller, and boot device. Every server we ship is bench-tested through a 12+ hour burn-in and backed by our 180-day warranty, and volume pricing is available once an order reaches 5 units. We quote configurations rather than selling fixed SKUs, so the hardware is sized to the workload instead of a box you have to design around.

When 8 SFF Bays Is the Right Choice

The R350 line has two chassis variants on identical platform internals. The R350 4-Bay 3.5" carries four large-format LFF bays for bulk local capacity; this 8-Bay 2.5" carries eight small-format bays. The choice is density versus capacity per drive: eight SFF bays give you more spindles and more room for an all-SSD or hybrid array, while four LFF bays give you more raw terabytes per drive. Choose the 8-Bay when drive count, IOPS, or SSD density is the priority, and the 4-Bay when bulk nearline capacity is.

Everything else about the platform is shared with the 4-Bay and with the rest of the 15th-gen entry line: one Rocket Lake Xeon E-2300, four UDIMM slots capped at 128 GB, redundant hot-plug power, and iDRAC9 management. When a workload needs more than eight cores, more than 128 GB of memory, or registered DIMMs, the single-socket tier is the wrong tier and the dual-socket R450 8-Bay 2.5" on Xeon Scalable is the step up. If two drives and a single power supply are all the role needs, the lower-cost R250 4-Bay 3.5" Hot-Swap is the appliance-tier option.

Storage - 8 SFF 2.5" Bays

The chassis carries eight 2.5" hot-plug SFF bays on a SAS/SATA backplane. Because the backplane is hot-plug, a failed drive in a protected array is replaced and rebuilt with the server still running. Eight bays open up wider RAID layouts than the four-bay chassis: RAID 10 across eight drives (four usable, fast rebuilds, strong write behavior), RAID 6 with two parity drives across a larger set, or multiple independent arrays. SAS or SATA SSDs are the usual fit here for an I/O-oriented build, with 10K SAS drives an option where a mix of capacity and speed is wanted. There is no NVMe on this backplane; the R350 front bays are SAS/SATA only, and any NVMe would come from an add-in card rather than the front bays.

Compared with the 4-Bay LFF, the eight small-format bays prioritize spindle count and SSD density over per-drive capacity: a 2.5" drive tops out lower in raw terabytes than a 3.5" LFF drive, so for bulk nearline capacity the 4-Bay still wins, while for IOPS, SSD density, and RAID flexibility the 8-Bay is the better chassis. For boot, the right device is the BOSS-S2 card: two M.2 SATA SSDs in a hardware RAID 1 mirror on a dedicated, rear-accessible hot-plug card. It keeps the operating system off the eight front bays, so all eight stay available for the data array. Note the R350 uses the rear hot-plug BOSS-S2 specifically; the non-hot-plug BOSS-S1 is the R250 part. IDSDM and an internal USB 3.0 port are also available for hypervisor or recovery media.

Storage Controllers

The R350 supports the entry PERC 11 controller family plus software RAID. With eight bays the controller choice is load-bearing, because it decides whether parity RAID is available and how well it performs:

• S150: chipset software RAID. Adequate for a boot mirror or a light, non-production array. No cache, parity is host-driven; not a production data-array recommendation, and not the right choice for an eight-drive parity set.
• PERC H355: hardware RAID, no cache. It does RAID 0, 1, and 10 only - like the H345 and H350, it does not do RAID 5, 6, 50, or 60. Across eight bays the H355 supports RAID 10, which is a strong choice for an SSD array, but it cannot deliver parity RAID.
• PERC H755: hardware RAID with battery-backed cache. The controller to quote when an eight-drive array needs RAID 5 or RAID 6, or when parity write performance matters. On the R350, parity RAID means the H755; there is no other path to RAID 5/6 on this platform.
• HBA355i / HBA355e: pass-through HBA, internal and external, for software-defined storage or a host that wants raw disk access. This is the right choice for a small vSAN or other software-defined node.

What the R350 does not take is the older PERC 9/10 line: no H730, no H740P. Those are 13th and 14th-gen Mini-PERC parts, and the 15th-gen entry board does not carry them forward. The correct 15th-gen equivalents are the H355 (RAID 10 and below) and the H755 (parity RAID).

Processors

The R350 is a single-socket Rocket Lake platform on socket LGA 1200 with the Intel C256 chipset. It takes one Intel Xeon E-2300 processor, up to eight cores and sixteen threads, in roughly the 95W class. SKUs run from the lower-power E-2314 and E-2334 up to the 8-core E-2378 and E-2388G; Pentium options exist for the lightest roles but give up cores, cache, and turbo headroom. On an SFF build doing real SSD-backed I/O, the 6-core E-2336 or 8-core E-2378 is the sensible center of the range: enough threads to drive a multi-drive array, an application server, a small database, or a handful of light virtual machines.

One platform fact worth stating plainly, because it surprises buyers: the integrated graphics on the Xeon E-2300 are disabled on Dell servers. Console video comes from the Matrox G200 in iDRAC9, not from the CPU iGPU. That has no effect on a headless server role, but the on-die graphics are not a usable display path here. This is Rocket Lake (Cypress Cove), the Xeon E-2300 generation. It is not Ice Lake-SP; Ice Lake-SP is the Xeon Scalable silicon in the R650 and R750, a different socket and a different platform entirely.

Memory

The R350 has four DDR4 UDIMM slots across two memory channels, two DIMMs per channel. Memory is unbuffered ECC only: no RDIMM, no LRDIMM, and no persistent memory. Some older catalog copy lists the R350 as taking UDIMM or RDIMM; that is wrong, the platform is unbuffered ECC only. Maximum capacity is 128 GB using four 32 GB unbuffered ECC modules. Rated speed reaches DDR4-3200 on the Xeon E-2300 SKUs; a Pentium caps lower at 2666, and a fully populated dual-rank, two-DIMM-per-channel configuration steps to 2933 under Intel's population rules.

The 128 GB ceiling holds across every R350 chassis including this 8-Bay. For an SSD-backed application or storage role 128 GB is comfortable headroom, but it is still an entry ceiling and there is no registered-memory path. A buyer who can already see a deployment growing past 128 GB of memory, or running a dense virtualization host on this many drives, should size up: the dual-socket R450 8-Bay 2.5" with sixteen registered DIMM slots is the platform that scales.

Networking and PCIe Expansion

Onboard networking is a Broadcom 5720 dual-port 1 GbE LOM plus a dedicated iDRAC management port. There is no Network Daughter Card or OCP mezzanine on this platform and no onboard 10 GbE: the R350 networks at 1 GbE on the motherboard. An eight-drive SSD array can easily outrun a 1 GbE link, so on an I/O-oriented 8-Bay build a 10 GbE or 25 GbE add-in NIC is usually part of the configuration; plan for it.

PCIe on the R350 is three PCIe Gen4 slots plus a dedicated controller position, all low-profile and half-length. The dedicated PERC slot means the H755 does not consume a general-purpose slot, leaving the three Gen4 slots free for a faster NIC, an external SAS HBA, or other expansion. For workloads that need more expansion than three slots or a second socket behind them, the 2U R750xs 8-Bay 2.5" is the larger-chassis step in the same generation.

GPU Support

The R350 is not a GPU platform, and we do not pretend otherwise. The 1U thermal envelope, the single-socket power and lane budget, and the low-profile PCIe slots leave no practical room for a compute accelerator; there is no x16 slot at the power and cooling a datacenter GPU needs. If a buyer lands here looking for GPU compute, inference, or transcode, this is the wrong box. For GPU-capable Dell hardware, look at the 2U PowerEdge R750, which has the slots, power, and cooling for double-width accelerators.

Management - iDRAC9 Generation

The R350 runs iDRAC9 with Lifecycle Controller, the same out-of-band management generation as the rest of Dell's 15th-gen line. iDRAC9 is licensed as Express, Enterprise, or Datacenter. Express covers basic remote monitoring and IPMI; for production you generally want Enterprise, which adds the full virtual console, virtual media, and the System Lockdown feature that prevents unplanned firmware and configuration drift. Datacenter adds telemetry features that matter more in dense fleets than on a single entry server.

On the security side the R350 carries Dell's silicon Root of Trust, Secure Boot, and cryptographically signed firmware, with an optional TPM 2.0 module for measured boot and compliance frameworks. For a branch or small-office deployment the practical value of iDRAC9 Enterprise is being able to reboot, reinstall, and recover the server remotely without a site visit, which on a remote box often pays for the license on the first incident.

Power and Cooling

Like the 4-Bay, the 8-Bay ships with dual hot-plug redundant power supplies. A power-supply failure does not take the server offline, and a failed unit is replaced without downtime. PSU tiers run in the 600W to 700W class, in Platinum and Titanium efficiency, with the exact tier confirmed per SKU at quote time; an eight-SSD build is well within the lower tier's budget. Redundant power is part of why the R350 is the entry server for roles that have to stay up.

Cooling is sized for the single-socket E-2300 envelope. The 95W-class processors here do not require the high-performance heatsinks that the higher-TDP Xeon Scalable platforms need, and there are no exotic thermal constraints to plan around at this tier; standard data-closet and small-rack ambient conditions are well within range.

Physical Specs & Platform Notes

• Form factor: 1U rack, approximately 558.9 mm deep, regulatory model E77S. Fits standard-depth racks and most short-depth cabinets.
• PCIe expansion: three PCIe Gen4 slots plus a dedicated controller position, all low-profile half-length. The dedicated PERC slot keeps the RAID card off the three general-purpose slots.
• Parts availability: strong. The R350 is a current 15th-gen platform; 2.5" drives, redundant power supplies, DDR4 UDIMMs, PERC 11 controllers, and BOSS-S2 cards are all readily sourced, and Dell platform support for 15th gen is active.
• Accessories we recommend: a BOSS-S2 boot card so the OS stays off the eight front bays; the Dell A12 1U sliding rail kit that fits the R340, R350, and R360 chassis; and a 10 GbE or 25 GbE NIC, which an eight-drive SSD array usually warrants.
• Platform notes: eight 2.5" hot-plug bays and dual hot-plug redundant PSUs, so drives and power are serviceable without downtime; no NVMe on the front backplane; CPU integrated graphics disabled with video via the iDRAC9 Matrox G200; rear hot-plug BOSS-S2 rather than the R250's BOSS-S1.

Our Assessment

Where it excels: The R350 8-Bay 2.5" is the right answer for a small-business or branch-office server that wants drive count and SSD density in a redundant, serviceable 1U box. An SSD-backed application server, a small all-flash or hybrid array, a database with its data spread across multiple fast drives, or a small software-defined storage node behind an HBA all fit comfortably inside its envelope. The eight bays plus the H755 give it real RAID flexibility, and the redundant PSUs and hot-plug drives make it appropriate for roles that have to stay up.

Where to look instead: If bulk nearline capacity matters more than spindle count, the R350 4-Bay 3.5" carries larger LFF drives. If two drives and a single power supply are enough, the lower-cost R250 4-Bay 3.5" Hot-Swap covers the appliance case. If the deployment needs more than eight cores, more than 128 GB of memory, or registered DIMMs, the dual-socket R450 8-Bay 2.5" is the platform; for a larger 2U SFF chassis in the same generation, the R750xs 8-Bay 2.5" is the step up. GPU work belongs on the R750.

Bottom line: This is the SFF entry Dell. An organization that wants eight serviceable 2.5" bays, redundant power, and real RAID flexibility in a single inexpensive 1U server, and that knows it will stay inside one Xeon E-2300 and 128 GB of memory, gets exactly that here. The typical buyer is an IT generalist or a managed-service provider standing up a branch or small-office SSD-backed application or storage server where density and uptime matter more than raw capacity.

Honest Limitations

• Single socket, eight cores, 128 GB. A hard ceiling: no second CPU, no path past four DIMM slots, and no registered memory. Size for it or buy a higher tier.
• Unbuffered ECC memory only. The four slots take UDIMMs only, capped at 128 GB. No RDIMM or LRDIMM path exists on this platform.
• No NVMe. The eight front bays are SAS/SATA only; any NVMe is an add-in card, not a front-bay device.
• Lower raw capacity than LFF. Eight 2.5" drives hold fewer total terabytes than four large 3.5" drives; the 4-Bay is the capacity chassis.
• Parity RAID requires the H755. The entry H355 is RAID 0/1/10 only; RAID 5 or 6 needs the H755 controller.
• 1 GbE onboard networking. An eight-SSD array can outrun 1 GbE; faster networking is an add-in card.
• Not a GPU platform. No accelerator path; see GPU Support above.

Workload Fit

Where to Look Instead

• Same platform, LFF capacity: R350 4-Bay 3.5", four large-format bays for bulk nearline capacity instead of eight SFF bays.
• Lower cost, appliance tier: R250 4-Bay 3.5" Hot-Swap, the entry without redundant power.
• Up a tier for cores and memory: R450 8-Bay 2.5", dual-socket Xeon Scalable with registered memory beyond the entry ceiling.
• Larger 2U SFF chassis, same generation: R750xs 8-Bay 2.5", more drives and expansion in a 2U form factor.
• Previous generation: R340 8-Bay 2.5", the 14th-gen entry SFF predecessor on the Xeon E-2100 and E-2200.
• Rail kit: the Dell A12 1U sliding rail kit for the R340, R350, and R360 chassis.

Ready to Configure?

Tell us the workload, the drive type and capacity, the RAID level, the memory target, and the quantity, and we will build a configuration around it. Call 1-800-778-1545 to spec the CPU, memory, drives, controller, and BOSS-S2 boot card with a technician who knows the platform. Every R350 ships after a 12+ hour burn-in and a full inspection, carries our 180-day warranty, and is available at volume pricing from 5 units. We quote configurations rather than fixed bundles; request a quote and we return formal pricing, typically within one business day.