EXI 5.5 adding ide hard drive

[Sunny123]

Hi Everyone,

I am new to ESXi 5.5.  I have one SATA drive and 2 IDE drives.  My BIOS show all the drive, and I have to install ESXi 5.5 on my SATA drive.  However, when I try to add storage using VSphere client, I am not able to see my 2 IDE drives.  My question is how can I add those drive to increase my data storage and install virtual machine ? or do I have to add those hard drive using ESXi command line tool?

Sunny

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Community - As far as I know IDE is not supported as a storage device for ESXi -

[joviyach]

It is indeed not supported for ESXi 5.x. It's actually been a question on my VCP-DCV practice exams that I have been taking...

[JarryG]

You can not add it directly, but you can buy ide2sata or ide2usb adapter...

[Sunny123]

Thanks to everyone now I know that either I have to buy external usb case or SATA drive.

Sunny

[a_p_]

USB doesn't help, as VMFS datastores cannot be created on USB drives. USB is only an option for the installation of the Hypervisor (ESXi) itself, and for this 1GB is sufficient.

André

[Sunny123]

That means I have to get IDE2SATA adapter.

[a_p_]

I never tried something like this, so I can't tell you whether this will work. In case this host is going to be a production system, I actually wouldn't even worry about using adapters, but use supported controllers and disk drives. What's the cost of a potential data loss compared to the cost of a new HDD?

André

[JarryG]

I hope he wants to use these ide-drives just for local backup, or testing/learning. For any serious (not to say production!) use I'd say hw-raid with enterprise-class drives is necessary...