ESXI IOMMU on Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3

[Geofrancis]

has anyone used the direct pass though (AMD-Vd) IOMMU on this board? and has it worked OK? mine is arriving tomorrow but the processor is coming from Spain so it wont arrive till Monday. im just wondering can you pass the sata and USB controllers through to a VM?

i am migrating my ESXi server from its current e6500 and 965p-ds3p board to the 970A-DS3 and 1055T x6.

Because ESXi doesn't support powering down hard drives in my UNRAID drive array i need to pass all the controllers through to the UNRAID server so it can send the spin down command to the drives. it currently has 11 SATA hard drives including the VM host drive, cache and parity so when it was running UNRAID directly only 3-4 drives were spinning at the same time unless i was browsing files in lots of different folders but that got fixed by caching the folders so the drive only powered up once the file was being accessed. that lowered the power consumption by about 60w so with this board i should be able to pass through all the SATA controllers to the UNRAID os and it should work like it did before with the drives powering up on demand. shouldn't it?