Summary of Server Differences
The Dell PowerEdge R430 is often overlooked, but it compares surprisingly well against its big brother, the Dell PowerEdge R630. There are three main differences, depth, memory slots, and drive configurations. For those depth limitations in their rack, the 24” depth of the R430 could be the deal maker. The R630 is only a few inches deeper, but those inches could make all the difference. With that shorter depth, you give up 12 memory slots. The R430 maxes out at 12 memory slots while the R630 gives you 24. The price of the larger DIMMs has dropped which makes it less of an issue because you can use 32GB DIMMs to make up for the limited space. With the R430, it does give you an option to get 3.5” drives which is nice in a short 1U chassis, but make sure you go with the hot swap version. If you go with cabled drives, maintenance becomes more difficult with any drive failure. They both offer 8x and 10x 2.5” configurations, but only the R630 gives you up to 4 NVMe drive bays. It may not be something you use now, but having that capability makes the server more versatile down the road.
For many companies, it will almost be a coin flip between the R430 and the R630. Unless there is a massive price difference between the servers, I would recommend selecting the one with the most flexibility and expansion capabilities in the future and in this case that would be the R630.