I picked up 2x of these EC200a units with the goal of running ESXi on them (7.0b/7.0U1). It was running it for a few weeks with no real issues on a Samsung Fit Plus USB 3.1 32GB drive, I have had one of these fail in the past, and they get set to read-only, it appeared that this happened to it so I bought 2x Sandisk 32GB Ultra USB 3.0 drives. I'll install ESXi, and sometime's I won't be able to install it, sometimes I can fully boot it after a install, sometimes it crashes in the BIOS, and sometimes when it boots, it seems to stop being able to write to the drive after a boot. (Adding it to vCenter, adding a vDS, etc doesn't "stick")
I ran over to Microcenter and picked up their cheapest 120GB SATA SSD, and it works great and reliably every time... The kicker, I want to be able to use both SATA ports now for storage (vSAN, but that's for another day).
I've actually tried a total of 5 different USB drives, and they all have similar issues, one of them is a cheap-o Sandisk USB 2.0 device. This happens with either of my 2 power bricks, and on both EC200a boxes. I was expecting to see SOMEBODY here having an issue, but it appears to be just me.
TL;DR: USB drives seem incredibly flaky for booting on the EC200a
Thoughts? Anyone else having this issue?
Edit: I should mention that I'm on BIOS v2.66 (07/19/2019) on both boxes, am using ILO4 2.75 Advanced, and the
"desktop" Windows ILO client for all of my interfacing with it. Maybe I should just try hooking up a VGA/KB for all of my interfacing with it.
Edit #2: I thought I was on the EC200a thread. My witts aren't about me anymore. I crossposted there, sorry.
