Marvell 88SE9172 SATA Controller issues

Hello,

I am setting up an ESXi 5.1 server on my home-lab machine, based on mobo ASUS P8Z68-V PRO (spec: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/P8Z68V_PRO/#specifications).

This mobo has two onboard SATA controllers - Intel Z68 chipset (6 ports) and Marvell 88SE9172 (2 ports, 6Gb/s).

The Marvell controller is NOT on the compatability list, but it seems that ESXi is able to recognize it:

But if I try connecting the datastore drives to the Marvell ports (one Patriot 64G SSD, one Maxtor 250G), they are not recognized by ESXi at all (this is before enabling passthrough, as seen in the screenshot).

So I tried passing through the controller to a VM (once to unRAID, and once to Windows 7) in order to use it in the VM if not with ESXi, but that too did not work - in neither VM could I see any new device at all...

So my question is - can anyone help with making either of the configurations work?

I would be satisified with either - ESXi recognizing datastores drives on the Marvell controller, or successfully passing through the controller to a VM so I can use it in one.

Thanks,

- Itamar.