I am researching purchasing a Dell PowerEdge 1950 to use with ESX Server 3.0. I have a question about hard drive compatibility. The I/O guide says that: "IDE RAID and SATA RAID are not supported for the VMFS file system." The PERC 5/i controller for the Dell server is listed as supported in the I/O guide, and it can also be configured with either SAS or SATA drivers. However, when I configure it with SATA drives the Dell configuration setup notes that SATA drives are not supported by ESX. I am trying to find out if this is true or not? Does anyone know if there is a difference in how the drivers access the PERC RAID controller for SATA and SAS drives. My thought process is that if VMware is providing a driver that works with the controller, then it should work with either type of driver. But I don't have any way of confirming this for certain. I anyone has information that can provide a definitive answer one way or the other I would appreciate it. Thanks.
