Hi, I have a simple HP Proliant MS Gen8 with 2 drivers attached - a 100GB laptop hdd used as a datastore and a WD Green 6TB drive.
I've noticed that when running the drives in SATA AHCI mode, the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 or 6.0.0 ISO (both from VMware and HP) fail to install or work properly.
If I map the drives as "SATA Legacy" (as IDE) things are working. For example: if I install ESXi on the drives in legacy mode, after switching them to "AHCI" ESXi boots but soon after stops seeing the drives, I get "loading..." and it freezes. If the drives are in AHCI mode, the installers freeze when gathering system information (after mentioning the password).
After trying an older ESXi HP 5.5 ISO I've been able to isolate the issue to the "sata-ahci" driver; version "3.0-20vmw.550.2.33.2068190" works while "3.0.21" (which is shipped by default with ESXi 6) does not. Based on the changelog(https://esxi-patches.v-front.de/ESXi-5.5.0.html) , it looks like the breakage was introduced in Jan 2015, when sata-ahci was patched (KB2099269) though it is unclear what was the change.
From what I can tell, the issue occurs only when using 4TB+ drives (as in my case).This means I need to either run the drives in "SATA Legacy"/IDE or forget about ESXi 6.
In 5.5 I need to be careful when applying new patches and keep downgrading the driver (and make sure it works with the base).
Any ideas, suggestions how I can fix this? Thanks,
