So I've had a great experience with Unraid as my core system running Windows as a VM for some of my gaming, but with some of these games blocking running on VM I'm considering running Windows 10 with ESXi and virtualizing Unraid.  My system has an AMD Ryzen 5900x and a X570 motherboard, with a 3060 Ti GPU passed through to the VM and a 1660 being used - maybe unnecessarily - for things in Unraid like Plex transcoding.  Most of the time my CPU load with the one VM and about 20 containers is in the 4-11% range (when not gaming).

I use the X570 SATA connectors for all my array drives, parity, and even the dedicated SSD I pass through to the VM.  I have an LSI SAS card with SAS to SATA cables, but I'd rather not use it if I can use the X570 SATA connections.  I don't really have access to a slot and I'd have to give up my quad NIC or the 1660 to make room.

What I've read lead me to believe I need to use a PCI controller card for things like spindown, SMART, etc. to work.  I beleive that's because it has to be actually passed through, which would make it unavailable to the Windows host.  Is that correct?

What I've read lead me to believe I need to use a PCI controller card for things like spindown, SMART, etc. to work.  I beleive that's because it has to be actually passed through, which would make it unavailable to the Windows host.  Is that correct?

Not quite. You can pass your SATA drives as RDM (see other posts in this subforum, can't link right now). I've been doing that for years and it worked very well. SMART, Spindown, performance,gthe works.

There's a "tribal knowledge" thing going around that these things do not work in that scenario. Not the case in my experience.

Thank you,@doron. This may be the path I take.

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@BurntOC, here are some related messages from this forum: This and this.

@BurntOC, here are some related messages from this forum: This and this.

Very much appreciated.

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