Benchmark - N7700Pro vSphere ESX V4U1 Request

[ltmiii]

<First Post!>
I have a few questions and I thought I would ask the resident experts here. While they are geared toward vSphere, I'd appreciate any feedback/experience on SATA disks in the N7700 Pro. I was researching the WD RE4's but it appears some people have had some bad luck with them. So, I'm looking for some solid metric performers that have perhaps withstood the test of time to avoid any vendor induced learning curves. (Prefer 500G-2TB Reviews w/the N7700Pro)

1. Has anyone tested the N7700Pro on ESX/ESXi?
2. If so, would you be able to post any hdparm/dd results with the raid configuration, disk group count, etc.
3. Is it possible to tweek the r/a or txql on these devices? Any experiences?
4. Does the N7700 Pro work with round robin for active/active i/o on iSCSI?
5. Has anyone had any stability issues w/esx or esxi using the N7700 Pro?

My current lab is in desperate need of an upgrade and I dont want to spend the money for an MD3000i or eq. Since the 7700Pro is now on the VMware HCL, I'd really appreciate any feedback on it.

Thanks, L.

[remoh]

Maybe take a look here:

http://forums.hexus.net/thecus-care-...n8800-pro.html

I am not totally sure, but N7700PRO and N8800PRO are quite similar.

1 - The N8800PRO works (so far, i have it only for 1 month) without problems with my ESXi4U1 servers. I am using iSCSI, the box is connected to 8 ESXi Servers, actually for doing backups and running some testing VMs.

2 - I finally decided to create a RAID6 using all 8 drives, because rebuild a big RAID5 of 7 Disks take about 18h. Risk is too high that another drive may fail while rebuilding. The N8800PRO is using mdadm for creating its raid. It is using software RAID and has no RAID controller, so i am not sure if hdparm can give you useful information.

3 - as far as i know - no

4 - can't tell, don't using multipathing yet

5 - No