So... I recently decided to pick up unraid as my primary storage platform again (after almost 5 years on "other" products because "reasons"), and are running my full infrastrucure on a Proxmox-cluster. Yes, this also means my primary storage is virtualized, and has been for at least a decade, so this is not that discussion. With the ability to (now) not having to do any type of black magic to boot from disk, instead of relying on USB-stick this is really a no-brainer for me, as I have had two unlimited Pro-licenses since the dark ages, and unraid is my preferred platform. Due to some "funny" hardware quirkiness, my storage cabinets requires some special handling, which I would rather do on Proxmox than inside unraid. I have no simple way to pass anything other than fulll virtio-disks to the vm, and I will not try to reinvent a solution that has been working exceptionally fine for me over several years - so this is not that discussion either. However, since this way of passing disks to a VM effectively stops unraid from using SMART on disks, I wrote a simple proof-of-concept smartctl proxy for unraid to side-channel SMART queries to the correct hardware on host, and hey presto! SMART support on virtual harddrives inside unraid running on a VM. A side-effect of this is that I can also query the underlying hardware for any virtual disks that are not backed by a full disk, as evident by me now getting the SMART-data from the nvme-drive that backs the files used for Ssd-cache and Boot. Is there still anyone else running unraid with disks passed this way, and would there be any interest in a plugin that contains this side channel proxying? Attaching a few images of my initial test installation with SMART working for passed full drives, and passed file backed storage.
