This seems to be a VM hardware version issues, hardware version 17 has sata in green, however pvscsi in grey with no drive connected, and compiling / booting ends up with no drives connected in dsm. So i do believe it's got to do with the sata / scsi mapping. With adding any scsi controller (pvscsi would be preferred), even with no disks attached, everything is grey again. Remove the controller and boot back so sata only and things are back to green and happy