Passing Entire Physical Disk to VM

[Taddeusz]

My Windows VM currently has a PCIe NVME that I passed through. Since that was a PCIe device it was really easy. I'd like to add a second SATA disk to my VM. How is this accomplished?

[ghost82]

Hi, without passing through the sata controller, first you need a virtual controller.

Having said that you can passthrough the whole disk as a block device, with this xml snippet (this is an example that passthrough the disk with id ata-CT500MX500SSD1_1807E10EA5F2) inside the <devices></devices> section:

 

    <disk type='block' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='writeback'/>
      <source dev='/dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT500MX500SSD1_1807E10EA5F2'/>
      <target dev='hdc' bus='sata'/>
      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='2'/>
    </disk>

 

The above snippet passthrough a disk attached to a sata virtual controller (bus='sata'): q35 machine type already includes one at 00:1f.2

To find your disk identifier (id) simply do "ls /dev/disk/by-id/" in unraid terminal.

-partx (where x is a number) are not disks but partitions, so ignore them all.

Edited October 20, 2021 by ghost82

[Taddeusz]

@ghost82 Thank you for the help. I finally got to it today. Had a drive to replace to expand my array and put in an extra drive for my VM. Worked perfectly.