Running esxi 5.0 standalone in my lab, I have 4 sata ports on my onboard controller which are passed through to a windows VM no problems. I see the controller and 4 disks in device manager and disk management no problems.
I added a second controller (a Marvell 88SE92xx pci-x 4 port SATA card) with 4 HDDs attached. Also passed this guy through to the same VM, and 2 of the 4 HDDs show up in disk management, and I can see the controller and the 2 disks in device manager. Can't see why the other 2 disks are not appearing.
When the host boots the bios shows the Marvell controllers bit where it detects the disks, and all 4 HDDs show up there so I know they are physically connected and functional.
Neither controllers are doing any sort of RAID, I know ESXi doesnt like cards with software raid, but it seems both controllers are being detected by windows (so passthru is working) so I'm puzzled why only 2 of the 4 HDDs on the second controller are being detected.
Any ideas?
