Maybe I just took for granted that ESXi 3.5 wouldn’t work at all with IDE disks.  So much so, I went out and bought a 250GB SATA disk just for the expressed purpose of hosting my VMs on ESXi at home.

Apparently I was wrong.   This weekend I moved my VM Host from one computer to another, with its new home resting on a HP D330.  That process was as straightforward as could be.  I just moved the usb memory stick that was holding onto the ESXi hypervisor and installed the SATA disk in the new computer.  After configuring the network card to be part of the management network, I logged in and it detected everything just fine.

But i’m missing telling you something.  Just for kicks, I left the IDE hard drive in the system by itself and for some reason, ESXi let me add storage to it.  I can’t explain it - maybe this works for more people than just me.   The hard drive/controller shows up as “Block SCSI”, which is possibly how this is working.   I’ve created a VM on there and ESXi seems to be happily using it. 

Click on the screenshots below for an actual view of my configuration.   Has anyone else been able to reproduce this kind of behavior?  Maybe we all just took for granted when we read that ESXi wouldn’t work on IDE hard disks.  Maybe there’s a subset of hardware where you actually can use IDE hard disks.