Reference Guide

8 NVMe and I/O Topologies for Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers
2.3 PowerEdge R740xd
Populated with twelve NVMe drives
Figure 4: PowerEdge R740xd CPU mapping with twelve NVMe drives and twelve SAS drives
Performance 2U Server; Maximize NVMe Bandwidth
This 2U R740xd configuration offers up to twelve NVMe drives and twelve SATA/SAS
drives. The SATA/SAS drives connect to CPU1 through the integrated PERC, while the
twelve NVMe drives map to both CPU1/CPU2 through a direct CPU x4 connection. This
drives maximum performance, using PCIe extender cards to utilize PCIe lanes from
Slots 1, 4, and 8 for the NVMe devices. Customers supporting workloads that demand
maximum NVMe and storage performance will need maximum bandwidth to drive the
best throughput (GB/s) performance connect to the devices.