morti

I was off the news regarding Unraid for quite a while... but, if you want to have drives in a VM and do more with them then just store some unimportant stuff, it might be a better Idea to not pass a drive directly to a VM , but to pass an entire controller to the VM. Like a SATA controller over pci(e) or passing some pci(e) connected controllers off the motherboard itself. Same with usb devices and usb controllers. One thing that would be interesting for me would be the Synology Active Backup feature. I would set up an Unraid box, put a xpenology VM on it and would like to use that to backup ESXi VMs either to UNRAID itself or to a storage on the Synology VM. I am not certain yet if that would work.... I just found out about Synologys Active Backup capabilities on free ESXi servers myself.

To clarify, post the number of cache drives you used before, and the count you are using now. I do not want to misinterpret this, but the way you posted this it could as well be that you had a single cache drive, disconnected it, and replaced it with another drive - where "it" being empty would not be much of a surprise.