Compatibility between Dell Perc H730 and Seagate Constellation 4TB drives

In my experience, it's like putting more than 4 GB or RAM into a 32 bit OS, in that the additional space is simply not usable.

There is one major difference though, in that if you have support through Dell, and you use unsupported hardware (like a 3 TB drive), you will be invalidating your support, and may very well be told "no" if you need to call in about a an issue related to the PERC card, storage array or drives (and most anything can be stretched into being "related" to those components, if they want to badly enough).

It would really be best to just replace the 3TB drives with 2TB ones. Yeah, the price is about the same, but if you're not going to be able to use the additional TB of disk space, the only functional difference is that one's supported, and one is unsupported and "has NOT been tested or validated, so possible data loss could be experienced." The better choice is clearly the supported one that's otherwise functionally identical to the unsupported one.

You won't be able to bypass the RAID controller here... or at least you shouldn't.

ESXi is a minimal operating system and has a specific list of supported storage controllers and devices. Hardware RAID controllers are the norm for this type of deployment.

Things to note:

• S.M.A.R.T. is overrated. You have a hardware RAID controller that considers many factors in determining drive health, including S.M.A.R.T. Stick with that.
• You have to tell ESXi when you're using an SSD; usually when using an SSD attached to a RAID controller. Also see: VMware ESXi SSD on RAID showing as non-ssd
• If you really need a single device passed-through to the ESXi host, you need to use an appropriate HBA or system/motherboard connection.