The R740xd 24-Bay 2.5" + 4-Bay RFB is the maximum-SFF-density companion in the R740xd family. Twenty-four hot-swap 2.5" front bays on the SAS expander backplane plus four additional 2.5" hot-swap bays at the rear, for twenty-eight SFF total in a single 2U chassis. The Intel Purley dual-socket compute platform is identical to the 12-Bay 3.5" reference page; what is genuinely different is the front + rear SFF backplane combination and the architectural tradeoff: the rear bay assembly consumes riser slot 3, which reduces effective PCIe slot count and caps the GPU envelope at 2 double-wide cards (down from 3 on the standard 24-Bay 2.5"). In exchange you get the highest SFF density of any R740xd configuration and a clean physical separation between front and rear drive groups for cache/capacity tiering.

The buyer who picks this variant has usually thought through what those four rear bays are for. The patterns we see most often are: (1) cache + capacity tier separation in HCI, with the 4 rear bays as a cache tier (NVMe or write-intensive SAS SSD) and the 24 front bays as capacity tier - this is the textbook vSAN OSA configuration with 4 disk groups; (2) hot-spares plus OS storage combined, with 2 rear bays as global hot-spares and 2 rear bays as OS mirror physically separated from workload storage; (3) maximum-density VDI or database consolidation where every SFF spindle counts. The When 28 SFF Is the Right Choice section below covers the decision tree.

To configure a build, call 1-800-778-1545 for our account team. Every R740xd we ship runs through a 12+ hour burn-in across every memory channel, every PCIe slot, and every drive bay including the rear flex bay positions and every GPU slot under load for GPU-equipped builds. Every unit ships with a 180-day standard warranty and 1-Year, 2-Year, and 3-Year Premium options at quote time. Volume pricing applies at 5 units and above; tell us your workload, how you plan to use the rear bays, and your quantity, and we will put together the right BOM or steer you to the standard 24-Bay 2.5" if the rear-bay justification is not strong.

When 28 SFF Is the Right Choice

The + 4-Bay RFB earns its place in the R740xd family on one specific architectural pattern: 28 SFF in a single 2U chassis with physical separation between front and rear drive groups. It is the right call when the design uses the rear bays for cache tier, hot-spare + OS, or genuine maximum density. It is not the right call when 24 SFF would have been sufficient or when the PCIe and GPU constraints from the rear-bay assembly outweigh the four additional bays.

Pick the + 4-Bay RFB when:

• You are building vSAN OSA HCI nodes with explicit cache + capacity tier separation. The 4 rear bays as NVMe or write-intensive SAS SSD cache + 24 front bays as SATA SSD or 10K SAS HDD capacity is the textbook vSAN OSA configuration with 4 disk groups (1 cache + 6 capacity per group).
• You are building Ceph hyperconverged deployments with tiered OSDs, where the rear pair hosts the journal or WAL+DB tier and the front 24 bays host the BlueStore OSDs.
• You are running very-high-density VDI hosts at 60 to 100 user sessions with vGPU, where the 28 SSDs materially improve user-storage IOPS.
• You are consolidating large SQL Server deployments where every spindle counts, with separate placement of log, data, and tempdb across the front and rear groups.
• You can accept the GPU envelope cap at 2 double-wide cards (or you do not need GPU at all).
• You are not using mid-bay expansion (mid-bay and rear-bay are mutually exclusive on R740xd).

Pick the standard 24-Bay 2.5" companion when:

• 24 front bays is sufficient AND you want full PCIe slot count for additional HBAs, networking adapters, or 100 GbE
• You need 3 double-wide GPUs (the rear-bay assembly on this variant consumes the third GPU riser)
• You want mid-bay expansion to 28 SFF instead (different PCIe and GPU tradeoffs, but same drive count)

Pick the 24-Bay 2.5" NVMe companion when you need 24 NVMe drives with no SAS/SATA mix; this chassis caps NVMe at 12 in flex-zoning on the front bays.

Pick scale-out (two standard 24-Bay 2.5" hosts in a small SDS cluster) when better redundancy than single-chassis 28 SFF matters more than chassis count, which is the right call for production HCI clusters above a certain size.

Storage - 24x Front + 4x Rear SFF Bays

Twenty-four hot-swap 2.5" SAS/SATA front bays on the same SAS expander backplane as the standard 24-Bay 2.5", with the same flex-zoning support for up to 12 NVMe drives in the front group. Plus four additional 2.5" hot-swap bays at the rear, connected through dedicated SAS cabling that routes across the chassis top and consumes riser slot 3. The rear bays present to the OS through the same PERC or HBA as the front bays, giving you a unified 28-drive enumeration with the option to address front and rear groups separately.

Cache + capacity tier configuration - the canonical use case on this variant:

• Rear 4 bays: 4x NVMe or SAS SSD Mixed-Use as cache tier (vSAN OSA cache disk for each of 4 disk groups)
• Front 24 bays: 24x SATA SSD or 10K SAS HDD as capacity tier (6 capacity drives per disk group, 4 groups total)
• Controller: HBA330 pass-through for both front and rear backplanes (vSAN OSA and Ceph both want pass-through)

This is the textbook 4-disk-group vSAN OSA node and the configuration we ship most often on this variant.

Flex-zoning NVMe on the front backplane: Same as on the standard 24-Bay 2.5". Up to 12 NVMe drives in flex-zoning, with the common configurations being 16 SAS/SATA + 8 NVMe or 12 SAS/SATA + 12 NVMe. The 4 rear bays can also be configured as NVMe in some BOM revisions, but not all rear-bay assemblies support NVMe; confirm at quote time if rear NVMe is in your spec. For 24-drive all-NVMe deployments, the dedicated 24-Bay 2.5" NVMe companion is the right page.

Cabling architecture: The rear-bay SAS cables route across the chassis top and connect to the main backplane SAS expansion. This routing consumes physical space that would otherwise be available for mid-bay cabling, which is why mid-bay and rear-bay are mutually exclusive on R740xd. The architectural decision is locked at order time.

Rear-bay service access: Hot-swap drive replacement on the 4 rear bays requires unobstructed rear-rack access with enough clearance to extract drive caddies. If the rack rear has constrained clearance, drive swap requires temporary cable bundle relocation. Cable management arm installation is strongly recommended on this variant.

Drive options: Identical to the standard 24-Bay 2.5" companion. SAS SSD Read-Intensive (1.92, 3.84, 7.68 TB), SAS SSD Mixed-Use (1.92, 3.84 TB), SATA SSD Mixed-Use (1.92, 3.84 TB), 10K SAS HDD (1.2, 2.4 TB), U.2 NVMe (1.92, 3.84, 7.68 TB) for flex-zoning. See the 24-Bay 2.5" companion for the full drive-tier discussion.

RAID guidance for 28-drive arrays: SDS deployments are the cleaner answer at this drive count; HBA330 pass-through, let vSAN or Ceph handle redundancy. If traditional RAID is the requirement, 28-drive arrays need careful planning. A single 28-drive RAID 6 has impractical rebuild windows and excessive parity overhead. RAID 60 (multiple smaller RAID 6 spans) is the right pattern: for example, two 14-drive RAID 6 spans striped as RAID 60, or four 7-drive RAID 5 spans striped as RAID 50 if the drive class is SSD where RAID 5 is acceptable up to 6 drives. We work through the array layout at quote time.

RAID 5 is acceptable for SSD arrays up to 6 drives because of the short rebuild window and lower URE rate on flash. For arrays above 6 drives, RAID 6 is the floor. RAID 10 is the right call for write-heavy workloads where the parity-write penalty is unacceptable.

Boot: BOSS-S1 (Boot Optimized Storage Solution, dual mirrored M.2 SATA SSDs on a dedicated PCIe card, hardware RAID 1, cold-swap). Standard 14th gen boot device. We add it to every R740xd BOM by default. If the deployment uses 2 of the 4 rear bays for an OS mirror instead of BOSS, we will say so on the BOM explicitly and the customer makes the call.

Storage Controllers

The full 14th gen PERC family is available on this chassis via the Mini-PERC slot. Controller selection follows the same logic as the standard 24-Bay 2.5" companion; the rear-bay assembly does not change the controller story significantly, but the 28-drive count does push the HBA330 toward being the more common choice (SDS deployments dominate this variant).

PERC H740P (8 GB NV cache, battery-backed): Production storage default for traditional RAID workloads spanning front and rear bays. The H740P RAIDs across both backplanes as a single controller. For database servers or mixed I/O workloads where hardware RAID across all 28 SAS/SATA drives is the right model, H740P is the call. Note: H740P does not RAID NVMe; flex-zone NVMe drives are on software RAID or pass-through regardless of controller choice.

PERC H730P (2 GB cache, battery-backed): General-purpose hardware RAID option below H740P. Lower price point. Acceptable for read-heavy or mixed workloads.

PERC H730 (1 GB cache, battery-backed): 13th-gen carryover via Mini-PERC slot compatibility. Viable on the R740xd but generally a downgrade vs the H730P or H740P on Cascade Lake workloads. We see this controller frequently on the secondary market because 13th-gen-to-14th-gen field upgrades carried it forward rather than replacing it; refurbished units sometimes ship with the H730 already installed. Quote when budget is the hard constraint and write performance is not load-bearing; quote H730P or H740P otherwise. Not a primary recommendation.

PERC H330 (no cache): Entry-tier hardware RAID. Not appropriate for production 28-drive deployments on this chassis. Listed for completeness.

HBA330 (pass-through HBA): The most common choice on this variant because the canonical use case (vSAN OSA HCI with cache + capacity tiers) wants pass-through. Required for vSAN OSA, Storage Spaces Direct, Ceph, ZFS. The HBA presents all 28 drives directly to the OS or hypervisor.

PERC H840 (external): For external SAS enclosure connectivity when scale-out beyond 28 internal bays is needed.

S140 (software RAID via chipset): Dev/test only. Not a production recommendation.

Processors

The R740xd + 4-Bay RFB supports 1st Generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake-SP, 2017) and 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake-SP, 2019) in the same LGA 3647 socket. Drop-in compatible. Same V1 / V2 socket compatibility story as the rest of the 14th gen family.

CPU selection on this chassis follows the standard 24-Bay 2.5" logic: the workloads that pick the 28 SFF configuration are compute-active, so do not under-spec.

• Gold 6230 (20 cores, 2.1 GHz, 125W TDP): Sweet spot for vSAN OSA HCI and general SDS. Forty cores per chassis is more than adequate.
• Gold 6248 (20 cores, 2.5 GHz, 150W TDP): When the chassis hosts a high-density VDI cluster or a database server with active OLTP. Higher clock for latency-sensitive workloads.
• Gold 6248R (24 cores, 3.0 GHz, 205W TDP): For database servers running OLTP on 28 SSDs where both core count and clock speed matter. Requires high-performance heatsink.
• Platinum 8280 (28 cores, 2.7 GHz, 205W TDP): When core count drives the licensing or capacity planning for very high VM density.

Heatsink mismatch above 150W is the trap. Any processor above 150W TDP requires the high-performance heatsink. The standard heatsink will thermally throttle under sustained load. This trap is common on this variant because the workloads (VDI, large database, dense HCI) tend to pick higher-TDP CPUs. Confirm the heatsink at quote time against the CPU TDP.

Single-socket disables half the platform. A single-socket build on this chassis is even more costly than on other R740xd variants because the PCIe budget is already reduced by the rear-bay assembly. Single-socket on a GPU-equipped + RFB build is not a configuration we will ship without an explicit reason.

Storage-dense thermal note: 28-drive configurations run hotter than 24-drive configurations because of the additional rear-bay drives. The thermal envelope is unchanged but headroom is smaller. For Gold 6248 or above with GPU, confirm ambient temperature and rack airflow at quote time.

Memory

24 DDR4 DIMM slots: 12 per CPU, 6 channels per CPU, 2 DIMMs per channel. Supports RDIMM up to 128 GB per DIMM, LRDIMM up to 256 GB per DIMM. Maximum capacity 3 TB with 128 GB RDIMMs at 2 DPC, 6 TB with 256 GB LRDIMMs.

Memory speed by population and generation:

• Skylake (V1): DDR4-2666 at 1 DPC, DDR4-2666 at 2 DPC
• Cascade Lake (V2) Gold 6200 / 5222 SKUs: DDR4-2933 at 1 DPC, drops to DDR4-2666 at 2 DPC
• Cascade Lake (V2) other SKUs: DDR4-2666 at any population

Full memory population is the right call for high-density deployments on this chassis. The VDI, large database, and dense HCI workloads that pick the 28-SFF configuration push memory capacity hard. RDIMM at 32 GB or 64 GB is the volume sweet spot; LRDIMM at 128 GB or 256 GB per DIMM becomes the right call when you specifically need 1.5 TB or higher total capacity, which is more common on this variant than on the bulk-storage LFF variants.

Workload sizing guidance:

• vSAN OSA HCI with 4 disk groups: 512 to 768 GB is typical. vSAN benefits from memory for the cache layer.
• Ceph hyperconverged with tiered OSDs: 384 to 768 GB depending on OSD count and PG count.
• Very-high-density VDI (60 to 100 users): 768 GB to 1.5 TB depending on user profile.
• Large SQL Server consolidation: 1 TB to 1.5 TB for serious workloads with large buffer pools.

NVDIMM-N: Up to 12 NVDIMM-N modules (16 GB each). Same chassis-specific constraint as on the standard 24-Bay 2.5": NVDIMM-N battery on GPU shroud blocks full-length GPUs on riser 2. NVDIMM-N is uncommon on this variant in practice because the workloads that pick + 4-Bay RFB tend to be HCI or VDI rather than write-ahead-log applications, but confirm at quote time if NVDIMM-N is in your spec.

NVMe bifurcation BIOS setting: Flex-zone NVMe drives in the front bays and any PCIe-attached NVMe carrier require bifurcation enabled in BIOS. Default BIOS does not enable bifurcation. We set this at burn-in for any unit shipped with flex-zone NVMe.

Networking and PCIe Expansion

The R740xd uses Dell's Network Daughter Card (NDC) mezzanine standard. The NDC slot is dedicated and does not consume a PCIe slot, which matters even more on this chassis than on the standard 24-Bay 2.5" because PCIe slot budget is already tight from the rear-bay assembly.

NDC port options:

• 4x 1 GbE: Base option. Not recommended for HCI or VDI deployments.
• 2x 10 GbE + 2x 1 GbE: Acceptable mixed option.
• 4x 10 GbE: Baseline for general virtualization.
• 2x 25 GbE (Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx): Our standard recommendation for HCI on this chassis. vSAN OSA cache-tier east-west traffic and Ceph replication traffic both benefit materially from 25 GbE over 10 GbE.

100 GbE: Not available as NDC. If 100 GbE is the requirement, it goes in a PCIe slot. On this chassis the slot budget is tight (rear-bay takes one riser, flex-zone NVMe takes more if equipped), so 100 GbE competes for a limited remaining slot. ConnectX-5 is the right card; ConnectX-6 needs PCIe Gen4 which this platform does not provide.

PCIe expansion: Up to 8 PCIe Gen3 slots on the chassis, dropping to roughly 5 to 6 effective slots because riser 3 is consumed by rear-bay cabling. With flex-zone NVMe controller cards in play, the budget tightens further. A fully-loaded + 4-Bay RFB build with 12 NVMe flex-zoned, 2 GPUs, 100 GbE, and an external HBA is genuinely at the chassis PCIe ceiling; we work through the slot map at quote time and tell you what does not fit.

GPU Support

GPU is available on this variant but with a hard cap of 2 double-width 300W cards (down from 3 on the standard 24-Bay 2.5"). The third GPU riser slot is consumed by the rear-bay assembly. If you need 3 GPUs, the standard 24-Bay 2.5" is the right call.

Practical GPU + 28-SFF configurations:

• 2 x double-width 300W GPU + 28 SFF (no flex-zone NVMe): CUDA / ML inference deployments with all-SSD data tier. The 2-GPU cap is the binding constraint vs the standard 24-Bay 2.5".
• 1 x double-width 300W GPU + 28 SFF + flex-zone NVMe + 100 GbE: Single-GPU configurations preserve slot budget for additional networking and flex-zone NVMe controllers.
• 4 x single-width 150W T4 + 28 SFF: VDI with vGPU at high user density. The T4 single-width form factor fits more cards in the reduced slot budget than double-wide.

GPU enablement kit: Required for GPU-equipped builds. We add it to every GPU BOM by default. Same kit and same considerations as on the standard 24-Bay 2.5".

Management - iDRAC9 Generation

iDRAC9 Enterprise is the production spec. Full remote KVM with HTML5 console, virtual media, OpenManage Enterprise integration, Lifecycle Controller, Quick Sync 2 wireless management. Express tier is insufficient for unattended deployment; we spec Enterprise on every BOM by default. The rear-bay drive health metrics appear in the same iDRAC drive enumeration as the front bays, simplifying fleet-wide health monitoring through OpenManage Enterprise.

Silicon Root of Trust via the Intel platform. TPM 2.0 module supported. Cryptographically signed firmware verification at boot. Meets HIPAA, PCI DSS, CMMC, and federal civilian compliance requirements.

Secure Boot, BIOS recovery, signed firmware updates, and System Erase clear the bar for FedRAMP, DoD, and financial services environments without third-party add-ons. OpenManage Enterprise handles fleet-wide firmware management, configuration templates, and compliance reporting across all 28 drives.

Power and Cooling

Hot-swap redundant Dell Flex Slot PSUs: 495W, 750W (Platinum and Titanium), 1100W Platinum, 1600W Platinum, 2000W, 2400W. The 28-drive load draws marginally more than the 24-drive variant; SSDs are low-idle-power so the drive-count delta is modest, but GPU configurations push total draw substantially higher.

Spin-up current at scale: Less material on SSD than on spinning disk (SSDs do not have a mechanical spin-up surge), but flex-zone NVMe drives initialize aggressively at power-on. Multi-unit + RFB deployments on the same PDU should still coordinate boot sequencing for GPU-equipped builds, where simultaneous GPU power-on across multiple chassis can briefly load the upstream breaker harder than steady-state suggests.

Cooling is the standard 14th gen 2U fan kit, hot-swap, N+1 redundancy. The high-performance fan kit is the right call for GPU-equipped builds and for very-high-density VDI deployments where sustained CPU+GPU load is the operating profile.

Physical Specs & Platform Notes

• Form factor: 2U rack. Approximate dimensions 86.8 mm x 482.0 mm x 715.5 mm (H x W x D) with bezel. Identical chassis envelope to the rest of the R740xd family. Rear bays are flush with the rear panel; no additional depth required.
• PCIe expansion: Up to 8 PCIe Gen3 slots, dropping to roughly 5 to 6 effective slots after rear-bay cabling consumes riser 3. Riser configurations 1A / 1B / 2A / 2B available for the remaining risers; riser 3 is occupied by definition on this variant. With flex-zone NVMe controllers in play, slot budget tightens further; we work through the slot map at quote time.
• Parts availability: Excellent through 2030 minimum. The + 4-Bay RFB variant is lower volume than the standard 24-Bay 2.5" but the rear-bay assembly and the underlying chassis parts are abundant on the secondary market. Dell ProSupport channels remain active in 2026; third-party maintenance for 14th gen Dell is mature.
• Accessories we recommend: Dell ReadyRails II sliding rail kit for the R740xd (confirm part number at quote time against your chassis revision and cabinet depth), cable management arm (strongly recommended on this variant for rear-bay service access), Dell LCD bezel for the R740xd 2U chassis (confirm part number at quote time against your chassis revision), GPU enablement kit for GPU-equipped configurations.
• Platform notes: CPU hot-plug is not supported. NVMe bifurcation must be set in BIOS before flex-zone NVMe carriers will enumerate; default BIOS does not enable bifurcation. Mid-bay and rear-bay are mutually exclusive; pick one architectural direction at order time. Riser configuration is locked at order time. The SAS expander backplane firmware should be verified at intake for refurbished units. Rear-bay assembly is part of the physical chassis specification and cannot be field-converted.

Our Assessment

Where it excels: Maximum SFF density on a 14th gen Dell chassis with clean physical separation between front and rear drive groups. The reference vSAN OSA HCI configuration on this variant - 4 rear NVMe cache + 24 front SSD capacity, 4 disk groups, HBA330 pass-through, 25 or 100 GbE networking - is one of the cleanest single-chassis HCI nodes available on the secondary market. Ceph hyperconverged deployments with tiered OSDs follow the same pattern. Large SQL Server consolidations with separate log/data/tempdb placement across the front and rear groups. Very-high-density VDI hosts at 60 to 100 users per chassis with vGPU.

Where to look instead: If 24 SFF is sufficient and full PCIe slot count matters, the standard 24-Bay 2.5" companion is cleaner. If you need 3 double-width GPUs, the standard 24-Bay 2.5" is the only R740xd variant that supports it (this variant caps at 2). If you need 24 NVMe drives across a native PCIe-attached backplane, the 24-Bay 2.5" NVMe companion is the dedicated specialist. If you need bulk capacity at lowest cost-per-TB, the 12-Bay 3.5" with NL-SAS is the right call. If you need scale-out for better redundancy than single-chassis 28 SFF, two standard 24-Bay 2.5" hosts in a cluster is often the better answer than packing 28 drives into one chassis.

Bottom line: The + 4-Bay RFB is the right call for a specific buyer: the HCI architect building a single-chassis vSAN OSA or Ceph node with explicit cache + capacity tier separation, the database architect consolidating onto 28 spindles with separate I/O placement, or the VDI architect packing 60 to 100 users with vGPU into a single 2U envelope. About half our quote conversations on this variant end with us steering the buyer to the standard 24-Bay 2.5" because the rear-bay justification is not specifically about cache tiering or physical group separation; the other half are the right buyer for this variant. For that buyer, this is the configuration with a 4 to 6 year deployment horizon and significant TCO savings vs current-gen hardware.

Where the R740xd Fits in 2026

The R740xd is 14th gen Dell PowerEdge (Skylake-SP 2017, Cascade Lake 2019). Mature, well-supported on the secondary market, our highest-velocity 14th gen storage SKU family. Dell ProSupport on the R740xd is approaching end-of-extended-support; third-party maintenance is the standard production support path in 2026.

vs. 13th gen R730xd: Skip the R730xd unless you have a hard cost ceiling. The R740xd brings Skylake or Cascade Lake (vs Broadwell), DDR4 (vs DDR3), iDRAC9 with Silicon Root of Trust, and a 4 to 6 year longer parts availability runway.

vs. 15th gen R750xd (Ice Lake, 2021): R750xd adds PCIe Gen4 (doubled bandwidth for NVMe and 100 GbE), DDR4-3200, 32 DIMM slots, and 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable. The 15th gen rear-bay variants exist with similar architectural tradeoffs. For workloads bottlenecked on memory bandwidth or PCIe Gen4 I/O, R750xd is the upgrade path. For SFF density HCI on a budget, R740xd + 4-Bay RFB is still competitive.

vs. 16th gen R760xd2: R760xd2 is the current production storage-dense 2U with DDR5-5600, PCIe Gen5, up to 64 cores per socket on Emerald, BOSS-N1 NVMe boot, PERC H965i tri-mode (hardware NVMe RAID). For workloads in production past 2030 or needing current-gen support contracts, R760xd2 is the right step up.

vs. HPE counterpart: The cross-vendor analog is the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 24 SFF + rear-bay chassis. Same Purley dual-socket platform vocabulary, comparable iLO 5 management, comparable PSU envelope. The HPE variant offers similar 28-SFF density with similar architectural tradeoffs; the Dell-side advantage in 2026 is supply depth on this specific configuration and OpenManage Enterprise maturity for fleet management.

Honest Limitations

Limitations specific to this chassis (in addition to the platform-level limits shared with the rest of the R740xd family):

• PCIe slot count is reduced. Riser 3 is consumed by rear-bay cabling. Effective PCIe slot count drops from 8 (standard 24-Bay) to roughly 5 to 6 slots. Confirm your PCIe card list at quote time.
• GPU envelope is capped at 2 double-wide. The third GPU slot is consumed by rear-bay cabling. If 3 GPUs are required, the standard 24-Bay 2.5" is the variant.
• Mid-bay and rear-bay are mutually exclusive. Cannot have both. The standard 24-Bay 2.5" with mid-bay also gives 28 SFF total but with different PCIe and GPU tradeoffs.
• Rear-bay service access requires rack rear clearance. CMA installation is strongly recommended to keep cabling out of the rear-bay service path.
• 28-drive arrays need careful RAID strategy. Single 28-drive RAID 6 has impractical rebuild windows and excessive parity overhead. RAID 60 (multiple smaller RAID 6 spans) is the recommended pattern for traditional RAID at this drive count. SDS deployments avoid the issue with HBA330 pass-through.
• Hardware NVMe RAID is not available on 14th gen. Flex-zone NVMe drives are on software RAID or pass-through. For hardware NVMe RAID, step to 16th gen R760xd2 with PERC H965i.
• PCIe Gen3 ceiling. All slots and the backplane are PCIe 3.0. PCIe Gen4 cards run at Gen3 speeds. Upgrade path is 15th gen (Gen4) or 16th gen (Gen5).
• Memory speed drops at 2 DPC on V2 Cascade Lake. 2933 MT/s at 1 DPC, 2666 MT/s at 2 DPC.
• High-TDP heatsink mandatory above 150W. The dense workloads on this variant pick higher-TDP CPUs; the heatsink mismatch trap is common.
• Single-socket disables half the platform. Particularly costly on this variant where the PCIe budget is already tight.
• Bay configuration is order-time locked. The rear-bay assembly is part of the physical chassis specification.
• NVDIMM-N + GPU shroud constraints apply. NVDIMM-N battery on GPU shroud blocks full-length GPUs on riser 2.

Workload Fit

Where to Look Instead

• R740xd 24-Bay 2.5": Standard SFF companion without rear bay. Choose for full PCIe slot count or 3-GPU configurations.
• R740xd 12-Bay 3.5": LFF bulk capacity reference page for NL-SAS deployments.
• R740xd 12-Bay 3.5" + 2-Bay LFF RFB: The LFF equivalent of this variant. Same architectural pattern (more bays, fewer PCIe slots) but in LFF form.
• R740xd 24-Bay 2.5" NVMe: All-NVMe companion. Choose when 24 NVMe drives across a native PCIe-attached backplane is the requirement.
• R740 16-Bay 2.5": Compute-balanced 2U companion. Choose when 16 SFF is sufficient and storage density is not the constraint.

Ready to Configure?

Tell us your workload, target CPU class, memory capacity, drive configuration (SAS/SATA/NVMe flex-zoning mix, capacity per drive, how you intend to use the 4 rear bays: cache tier, hot-spares + OS, or additional capacity), RAID strategy, GPU requirements if any, network bandwidth, and quantity. Our account team will put together a tailored quote within 24 hours. Not sure if the rear flex bay is worth the PCIe and GPU tradeoffs? Tell us about your workload and we will recommend the standard 24-Bay 2.5" companion, the mid-bay alternative path to 28 SFF, or a small scale-out cluster if the rear-bay justification is not strong. That conversation is part of the quote process.

Call 1-800-778-1545 for our account team. Every R740xd ships with a 180-day standard warranty, runs through our 12+ hour burn-in with full SMART validation on every drive bay including the rear pair and load-testing on every GPU slot if equipped, and qualifies for volume pricing at 5 units and above. Request a Quote | Contact our account team