Figured it out finally... I was having the same issue. It's something to do with my RAID or the local datastore. I have an Areca controller. I actually created a VM, shared filesystem via NFS and installed the appliance on it and it worked fine. It must be something to do with that driver. I downgraded the driver and that didn't seem to fix it. It's certainly not ideal but something I can work around. It does make me wonder what other RAID/disk related issues I might be having though.
UPDATE: Yep, that was definitely the issue. I contacted Areca technical support and they sent me a beta driver to try that resolved the issue.