Dell PowerEdge R620

5owners with an opinion

80%of verdicts positive

3/0positive/negative since 2024

12 yrslongest happy owner

2happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for noise and value.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 12 years

Yep. This is why my 12-year old Dell R620s with Ceph on NVMe via Infiniband outperform the newest RDS and Aurora instances: the disk latency is measured in microseconds. Locally attached is of course even faster.

Likes itOwned 3 yearsStill going

Not OP, but I have an R620 running in my garage I use for self hosting. It has 12 cores (Intel Xeon E5-2665), 96GB of RAM, 10x2.5" drive bays (came empty). The SSDs I use I shuck out of old external USB drives. Together with a full standing rack on wheels, I bought them for $600 cash (plus U-Haul rental to get it home). My trick is craigslist in a city with datacenters (PHX). There are resellers here who buy used hardware from local datacenters and resell them to smaller businesses. I've had it running 24x7 for almost 3 years now and it is still going strong. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/ has some good references for acquiring hardware for a home lab setup.

Likes it

The degree is whatever you want to deal with. I had a rack at my last house (need to redesign the space for it at new house) with 3x Dell R620s in a Proxmox cluster, running K8s, serving Ceph from NVMe drives over Infiniband (for the mesh traffic), and 2x Supermicros running independent ZFS pools. It was fun to build - especially Infiniband - but my next iteration is going to be a single beefy server, maybe with storage attached externally. What I had had outstanding uptime, but ultimately it was massively overkill, noisy, hot, and sucked power down.

Likes it

Disagree. I run Ceph in Proxmox and have for years on a small cluster of 3 used R620 servers without any SSDs. It’s just worked. I’ve lost two of the machines due to memory failures at two different points in time and the k8s clusters sitting on top didn’t fail, even the Postgres databases running with cnpg remained ready and available during both hardware failures.

Neutral

> Oh man, having a 25U rack sounds really fun. For certain definitions of the word “fun,” yes. I have a 35U (I don’t need that many slots, but at the time I did need it tall enough that my kids couldn’t reach the top, where I put the keys), with: * 3x Dell R620 * 2x Supermicro (one X9, one X11) * 1x APC UPS w/ external battery * Unifi UDM Pro * Unifi Enterprise 24-port switch The Dells have Samsung PM863 NVMe drives which are used by Ceph (managed by Proxmox), with traffic sent over an Infiniband mesh network via Mellanox ConnectX3-Pro. The Dells run K3OS in a VM, which is a dead project. Big mistake there. The Supermicros have various spinners, and are in a ZFS pool. One of them is technically a backup that should power up daily to ingest snapshots, then power off, but there’s been some issue preventing that, so… It was all very fun to set up, and has been eminently reliable, but it’s a bit much. While you can in fact make R620s relatively quiet, they’re still 1U, and those little 40mm fans are gonna whine. It’s background noise to me, but guests definitely mention it if we’re close to the rack. Also, I’m now in the uncomfortable position of being stuck on Proxmox 7, because v8 (or more accurately, the underlying Debian release) dropped support for my HBAs, so the NAS would be dead in the water. I mean, I could compile my own kernel, or perhaps leverage DKMS, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of having a nice AIO like Proxmox. Similarly, my choose of K3OS means at some p…

Likes it

> I hope everyone at least once in their career gets to experience just how god damn fast hardware (especially networking speeds between your own servers) is. THIS. I realized cloud disks were much slower than I thought when I ran the same tests in RDS – with a local NVMe cache – against my decade-old Dell R620, with its disks also being NVMe, but via Ceph over Mellanox Infiniband. My server matched or beat the many-generations-newer RDS instance on almost every query. You can’t get around latency. Even at 1 msec, that’s a maximum of 1000 ops a single thread can do per second, modulo the various buffering and chunking strategies every layer does.

Likes it

I was honestly shocked at just how much compute you get for very little money on enterprise surplus servers. $150 on eBay for a dell R620, two 16-core Xeons and 64GB of RAM. Sure it's dated, but I still daily drive a quad core thinkpad from 2013, I'm not bothered. It's got more power than any machine I've owned up to this point. I don't have any use for more power, this guy is usually around 15% utilization. And someone just threw it away. Incredible.

Neutral

This is precisely what I plan on doing when I eventually launch my app. I have 3x Dell R620s in a Proxmox cluster running K8s nodes, Ceph on NVMe with CSI-RBD, and a separate Supermicro 2U exposing ZFS for spinning storage. The only missing link is 10G networking, because 10G switches aren’t super cheap.

Likes it

The massive noise difference between brands, models, and generations of rack servers is astounding to me. I have five rack servers in my house, not in a closet. Three are Dell R620s, one is a Supermicro X9, and one is a Supermicro X11. The Dells are 1Us and by all rights should be screamers, but they aren't. The Supermicros are 2Us, and while they weren't screamers, they were loud enough that on the one that's on 24/7 (the X11), I swapped the PSUs for quieter models, the CPU fan for a Noctua, and throttled the case fans. When the X9 boots up to ingest ZFS snapshots, you can definitely tell it's there. I used to think the R620s being bizarrely quiet was because homelab loads are understandably small, but then one day I got well over half the cores to 100% sustained doing something, and it didn't get any louder. I know they _can_ get loud, because at boot the fans go to 100%.

Likes it

I have three R620s. They are shockingly quiet after being booted, even under pretty decent load. If you tune C-states for energy conservation in the BIOS, they idle at just under 100W each. With moderate load (like you'd have in a homelab), around 125W. According to iDRAC, the peak they've seen is about 350W. For better apples-to-apples, each of them has 2x E5-2650v2, 3x SATA SSDs, 8x 16 GiB PC3-12800R sticks, and 1x NVMe SSD (mounted in a PCIe adapter). As a comparison, I also have a Supermicro X11SSH-F with a bunch (9) of spinning disks. It has a single E3-1220 v5, 1x NVMe SSD, 2x 32 GiB PC4-17000U, and averages 125W. Given the relative power consumption of HDDs, that's a pretty impressive difference IMO. My entire rack (the aforementioned servers, and some Unifi networking gear) pulls around 500-600W in total. When the backup server (Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+; dual-socket something-or-other Xeons, some DDR3 ram, and 8x spinning drives) kicks on daily to ingest ZFS snapshots, the total consumption is around 700W, I think. Maybe 750W.

Doesn’t like it

I bought a used Dell Poweredge R620 on eBay for $150 and brought the RAM up to 128GB for another $50. It runs proxmox bare metal, with all kinds of fun containers. I have wireshark, gitea, jellyfin, nextcloud, and a Debian VM that acts as a mirror for all of my Steam games with in-home download sharing or whatever it's called. It doesn't have a GPU, but yesterday I started playing with llama.cpp. It has two 16 core Xeon processors, which gives me almost acceptable performance with the Wizard 13B q4 model. Basically, any time I have the whim to play with something, I can just spin up a new container and delete it when I'm done. This server isn't great, it's fairly old and rather inefficient. But it's definitely been an interesting experience to play around with some real enterprise hardware. I keep it in the basement, and still you can hear it howling through the floor when llama kicks in