Moving from passed through disks to passed through controller


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Currently running Unraid in a Proxmox VM, which works fine. I have my disks passed through individually, since they're all just connected to the motherboard and at the time of installation I wasn't sure if I needed any SATA drives anywhere else (and I had no idea if I could actually passthrough the onboard SATA controller in the first place). This works fine, however, looks weird in Unraid.

 

Disks are called something like this:

0QEMU_QEMU_HARDDISK_drive-scsi0

 

Instead of this:

ata-Crucial_CT128MX100SSD1_14440DA9B9DF

 

If I were to some day move to a passed through SATA controller, for whatever reason, will that work if I make a new config and put the disks in the exact same order (but with very different names)? Or would I need to start from scratch?

 

I mean, I could pass a controller through and just go disk by disk and let it repair every time, but that would take weeks, while the data is just right there on the disks.

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I'm not overly familiar with Proxmox specifically, but assuming its HDD passthrough passes the entire physical drive to the VM, you should be fine with the process you described (also check the "parity is valid" checkbox). If the drive seen by Unraid is block/sector-wise identical to what it was seeing previously, this should work.

 

The remaining question would be whether you would actually be able to pass the SATA controller. Not all on-board controllers can be passed through; this would be mobo-dependent. But you'll figure that one out pretty quickly 🙂

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If I were to do that, I'd probably use a separate controller, so that wouldn't be an issue.

 

I'm asking this since I've read Unraid relies on the disk's ID's. When I pass them through individually, those ID's aren't visible to the VM (as you can see).

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Yes, it does. That's why you would opt for New Config - which will have Unraid see the new IDs. The important thing is that the data on the drives, as seen by Unraid, will be bit-identical, and with the presumption above holding, it should be. And of course, you'd need to make very sure the drives maintain their Unraid slots - Or Else 🙂 

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  • 1 year later...

Wanted to note in here that it can be easier to passthrough the serials in the VM. You modify conf file for the VM in proxmox.

 

It will look like the following:

0QEMU_QEMU_HARDDISK_WCT45QE6

 

Link to the guide:

https://dannyda.com/2020/08/26/how-to-passthrough-hdd-ssd-physical-disks-to-vm-on-proxmox-vepve/

 

Makes it easier when migrating to a vm or to using a hba passthrough.

 

Edit: Going to add in a short tidbit about what the guide says about serials here because I don't want the info to be lost if the site goes down for some reason. But if it helps and you want to support them please go click on some ads or donate to them cause it really did help me!

 

edit the file here (making sure to change '100' to your qemu vm id): /etc/pve/qemu-server/100.conf

on the line with your passthrough HDD /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx,size=xxxxxxK,serial=xxxxxx-xxxxxxx add in the serial. It can't be longer than 18 bytes.

Edited by AshranPewter
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