The RD1000 is an external USB drive.
ESX doesn't support USB, while some have got it to work others have found it un-stable.
The RD1000 is an Internal Drive with Removable SATA Hard drives. I am fairly sure but will check it later that it's plugged intoa SATA port on the Motherboard or a riser card.
Click on Tech Specs and it shows you the internal details also.
Ian
But it is still SATA, and ESX currently won't write a VMFS partition to it. I'm assuming you want to plug the drive into the ESX server, have it accessible as a mount point or volume and copy the VM's VMDKs and other file to it. Note: Some SATA controller actually appear to ESX as SCSI controllers, but given how the RD1000 is mounted I'd guess that it is sharing the CD-ROM controller and not the main disk controller. Guesses on my end.
Basically I don't believe this is do-able.
Just finished testing a workaround for this issue in ESXi5... use a Silex USB-to-IP Adapter, works great. And best part is there are 2 USB devices you can map to 2 different VM's.
our configuration is:
2 ESXi5 Hosts, 13 VM's, one of which is running 2K8R2 with Symantec BE 2010 R3 and backing up data from other VM's including Exchange to the RD1000. The SX3000GB is plugged into the Switch and the SBE connects to it via IP and wha laa... SBE sees the RD1000 just like it was plugged in to the physical machine. And being Gigabit, it ain't slow... averaging around 240MB/s
http://www.silexamerica.com/products/usb_device_connectivity/sx-3000gb.html