With the Seagate drives, I was getting around 2Mbs and 8Mbs copying data to them over a Gig-e network. With the WD drives, I'm now getting around 17Mbs!! A vast improvement. I managed to copy over 60Gb of VMs in a few hours, no problem. And that was via the VI client, which previously ran like a stunned snail!

So I can confirm, the following spec appears to work perfectly fine with ESXi 3.5.0:

ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 4000+
4GB Crucial RAM
2x Western Digital WD2500AAKS 250GB SATA hard drives
Liteon DVDRW IDE drive
GeForce 4MX AGP graphics card
Intel Pro1000MT NIC
3Com 3c905TX-CMX 100Mbs NIC

We're not using the onboard NIC as I disabled it some time ago for other reasons, and just went with the cards already in the box.

Now I just need a little iSCSI box, and I'm laughing. FreeNAS here I come!!!

I'd say that if the card is supported then all of the ports will function.

Only thing I wished you could do was create iscsi volumes as files as opposed to out of real partitions.

What dual NICs have you bought that works like a charm? I think I will invest in a few too - just want to make sure it works out-of-the-box.

Edit: It seems like there was some G1 models which are a little bit different from G5 models.

There are some differences like the G5 has:

• Slot 1: PCI 32-bit/33MHz PCI at 3.3V

The G1 has:

• Two 32-bit/33MHz PCI at 3.3V slot

...and also some different CPUs available.

I think it may be due to the support for the two sata connector card but it doesnt say that the 4 sata connector card will work.

My system is as follows:

Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe

AMD Phenom™ X4 9500 quad-core processor

8GB RAM

1 x 80GB Sata (Main install point for ESX)

1 x 150GB sata

2 x 500GB sata mirrored using 3ware 9650se card.

I was able to do the install, including booting from my 3ware cd to start the install and load the drivers for my card, I then followed the instructions earlier in this thread using the script provided and running inside of ubuntu linux live to fix the sata controller issue and the "could not mount root" error. However, what I am encountering now is that I can get into ESX no problem, configure it, etc, but the next time I reboot I am back to square one with the cannot mount root issue and stuck at the sh prompt.

Just wondering, any ideas why it does this. I think it has something to do with when I reboot and it says it is "saving vmware server configuration", I am betting it is modifying something back to an original state and is causing the error all over again.

tks

Jeremy