RDM of local SATA

[spectdev]

Should have listend to you, but I had read several places that RDM would perform better than vmfs. Perhaps this was true for previous versions of ESXI.

Thanks to all of you, for advise and help.

I heavily use local RDMs - not for performance, but for ease of migration and being able to access SMART data.
I too run FlexRAID (tRAID) in a VM with disks passed as RDMs. This allows for SMART access, allowing disks to go into sleep mode, as well as keeping the option of being able to move the disks to another system (whether physical or virtual) later.

In my testing, there were no significant differences in the performance benchmarks. It is quite possible that your one test might be skewed. So, don't write off RDMs on that basis.
One thing I always wondered was whether TRIM was supported for SSD RDMs. I never got a clear answer on this one when I asked on the VMware forums.

 

[EeyoreDK]

I use RAW for all my mechanical disks on the M1015 and it works fine, also with SMART data.