The Dell PowerEdge R670 is a powerful 1U server. The dual-socket 1U server has been around for eons, but Dell has managed to give this generation new tricks that greatly increase the usefulness of a 1U server. More storage, faster networking, and new accelerators add to the capabilities of a server line that continues its march of getting better in each generation. Let us now get into the Dell PowerEdge R670.
Dell PowerEdge R670 External Hardware Overview
Something that you may not have noticed, unless you track Dell’s bezels, is that the bezel makes the server look cool, and secures SSDs from accidental removal. It also adds just under 2mm or 0.11in to the 815.14mm or 32.09 inches deep that the server comes standard in, without the bezel. We should also note that Dell has a front I/O configuration that you cannot use with the bezel, but that sounds very exciting.
On the left, we get our rack ear.
On the right, we get the other rack ear with a USB Type-C service port and a power button.
In the center, we get something different. Typically, you might see 8x U.2 2.5″ NVMe drive bays on the front, or 10x. Here we have 16x E3.S drive bays, and there are options to go up to 20x on this front face.
Each block of eight drives with 61.44TB SSDs gives us just under 1PB of storage for sixteen, but the 20-drive configuration can surpass 1PB per U. Not too long ago, that was an exotic storage chassis with a lower-volume SSD form factor. Now, it is a standard PowerEdge feature.
The benefit to the E3.S design is that it is a thinner SSD form factor, which allows for higher density.
On the other side, we get 8x drives as well.
Looking ahead to PCIe Gen6 servers, the U.2 connector will no longer be supported, and the EDSFF connector will be the go-forward connector for signal integrity. We were a bit early with calling this transition, but it is happening.
Also on the front we get the Dell service tag.
On the rear, there are many options, but the basic featuers of dual power supplies, slots for add-in cards, and the rear I/O block are all here.
In our system, we have redundant 800W power supplies, one on each side. This is to help cabling to racks that have PDUs on either side of the racks.
Here are the two 800W 80Plus Platinum power supplies.
On the rear, we get the VGA port, two USB Type-A ports, and the out-of-band iDRAC port.
There are three low profile risers in this configuration. Dell has other options for different card sizes, rear storage, and more.
Since we need to balance out the external/ internal overviews a bit, here is Riser 2 that has two PCIe Gen5 x16 low profile slots.
Dell has a great tool-less riser experience. Also, as a hallmark of modern servers, we have cables adding PCIe lanes to the risers.
Riser 4 is the low-profile riser slot that is solo.
The riser has a neat feature where both the front and the rear of cards can be secured using tool-less supports. It is a small feature, but a nice one.
Next, let us get inside the server.
The Dell honeycomb faceplate looks more photogenic to me than HP and any post-IBM Lenovo design.
In my opinion air-cooled dual-socket 1U servers never made much sense, because the fans are just too small. Now that power consumption has gone up, the sensible choice for 1U is liquid cooling.
Surprised to see it score so low in the spider chart for Capacity since you mention more than once that it can hit over 1PB in a single U. Seems with flash, High capacity and performance are one and the same in 2026.
I’m noticing more & more super basic typos & mistakes in articles lately.
>Each block of eight drives with 61.44TB SSDs gives us just under 1PB of storage
This should read ‘just under 0.5PB’.
>On the other side, we get 16x drives as well.
This should read ‘we get 8x drives as well’.
This review is really starting to read like it’s AI generated :/
>Looking ahead to PCIe Gen6 servers, the U.2 connector will no longer be supported, and the EDSFF connector.
And the EDSFF connector… what? Will replace U.2? Or will also no longer be supported?
>Riser 4 is the low-profile riser slot.
Riser 2 is also low profile.
>In the center we get our man x16 riser connectors.
Main?
>external/ internal
>cable/ airflow
>GPUs/ AI acceleratiors
>cable organizer/ airflow guide
>1PB/ U (or more)
What’s with these extra spaces?
>management of fleets fo servers
This should have been picked up by a spell check.
>as dell has lots of sensors onboard
‘Dell’
>You can pick where you want the system to boot too
‘boot to’
>we also get DRAM power consumption that we can see here is 17-19W per socket
‘per DIMM’
Can STH do a better job of proofreading ? Yeah definitely. Is it a proof that the content is AI generated ? I’d say no, AI does different mistakes and unnecessary fluff. The articles here are very obviously following a template, but that’s a different thing, for better or worse. Given the type of content I’d say better.
This late trend of angry commenters “proofreading” the article, only to add as many mistakes than they correct is funny. I won’t comment on styling (spaces), it is language, medium and time dependent, and what is officially right is not always the most readable.
2 * 8 * 61.44 TB = 983.04 TB
18 W a DIMM would mean very hot memory, without heatsinks ! And 16 * 18W = 288 W, or 65% of the total system idle power. That’s nonsense. Plus you can read the screenshot.
I mean your comments on grammar, spelling and incomplete or unclear sentences are correct, but the math and physics of the article is sound, your corrections are not.
Better proofreading and phrasing wouldn’t hurt for sure, but in my own case, I am here for a reason, and it is not for literature, there’s better sources for that. At least the articles here do not need an AI summary of the AI generated fluffy hollow article, circling back more or less to the original prompt that generated the article in the first place…
@CJ:
Was just about to type up the same comment. Incomplete sentence is incomplete.
What is the cheapest Dell server available with iDrac10?
It’s like 2-3w per DIMM so 18w per socket is right. There’s no way it’s 18 per DIMM.
Your proofreads aren’t even accurate in all cases. Spacing is based on the style guide they’re using. You might be using a different one. I’ve been reading STH since 2018 and last summer I noticed they don’t use contractions.
I like the mistakes. It lets us know that there’s people making these, and it’s not AI slop.
On the content, I’d say this is a great review. You’ve gotta love Dell’s
For those commenting on the grammar: this is the same site that posted article after article referencing “a Nvidia [sic]” GPU and “a Nvidia [sic]” accelerator.
While Patrick was clearly saying “an Nvidia” in all his YouTube videos. One has to wonder if the articles are content-farmed out to non-English speakers.
I just bought one R670 at the end of November, before the terrible jump in memory prices.
I used to buy only the minimum amount of memory and disk with the server because DELL’s markup is like wine’s price in restaurants…
Three years ago, I bought a couple of R650 and the third-party DDR4 cost only 2000 euros for 768 GB. In Novembre, I spent 4000 euros with DELL for only 512 GB of DDR5 and third-party suppliers were much more expensive at this time. I cannot imagine how much it is now in February !
I have choosen the NVME U2 backplane and I’m happy with that because I already have plenty of Kingston DC1500M and DC3000M bought from Amazon for cheap two years ago.
DDR5 is a great improvement for perfomances and latency but I cannot use the Gen5 capability with U2 or U3 SSDs, it works only on PCIe slots or E3S.
My use case is not Ai but kust hosting hundred VMs with the excellent XenServer fork called XCP-NG.