I have been looking up guides and came across this one created by @N3z  a few years ago I guess (Creating a Windows 11 Gaming VM) and I saw a video that SpaceInvader made regarding his VM where he passed through his SSD.  I cannot get my unassigned SSD available to passthrough in the Tools/System Devices section. I can passthrough my GPU & GPU audio and my added NIC. But I can't get this damn SSD.

 

Secondly, I saw a video where SpaceInvader had his SSD partitioned so he wouldn't lose all his games and whatnot if he ever had to reinstall his VM. Smart idea but he never shows you how to partition a drive in Unraid as he had it. Spaceinvader One Video

 

Please help passthrough my SSD and partition my SSD 🙏

I figured it out. I left it unassigned and installed the vdisk.img on my cache drive then converted the vdisk to a physical disk onto my unassigned NVME. From then I was able to partition the drive from within the VM. I left the vdisk @ 64 GB so it wouldn't take much time to convert to a physical disk.

 

An issue I had was mounting the unassigned NVME to my VM when editing XML. I couldn't use (dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT4000P3PSSD8_2336E873F8BA). This kept giving me an error. Instead, I had to mount using (dev/nvme0n1). The bad part is that when I reboot Unraid it changes with nvme1n1. Every reboot they trade 👎. My VM is running faster than it's ever run. Running on a passthrough NIC and raw nvme! life is good!!! I had to be sure I reset my Unraid USB as the only bootable disc or my server would boot up into the physical Windows disk I created in nvme0n1.

 

Amazing SpaceInvader video

 

Ok, quick update! I found out how to locate the name of my nvme. It is "nvme-" not "ata-"

/dev/disk/by-id/nvme-CT4000P3PSSD8_2336E873F8BA

I went into the terminal and went into midnight command 

mc

Went into the location "dev/disk/by-id/" and found my disk.

Edited January 19, 20251 yr by BigDaddyDingDong
Update on new solves

Hi BDDD, I have a problem after upgrading to v.7 of unraid. I had Win11 VM and a separate 4TB HDD passed through in the system. VM was able to see the 4TB HDD and use it. After the upgrade I can't figure out how to add the 4TB HDD back....I used to do it by selecting 2nd vDisk Location: under VM settings and then manually adding the disk /mnt/disks/sdf/. I can get to this point and then in the VM itself when I initialize the 4TB HDD the VM freezes (goes in to PAUSE state). Is there anything that is now has to be done diferently in the v.7?

 

Thanks.

Thanks. Figured it out

 

@BKG Hey, I'm just seeing this. I wouldn't recommend using the "sdf" as the location. When you reboot your server that drive identification can change. open up the terminal in the top right-hand corner of the Unraid GUI enter 

mc

into the terminal and hit enter. From there go to /dev/disk/by-id/ & find your drive id and use that. You'll need to double click "/ . . " at the top to get to where you can find /dev.

 

So for me my path is :

"/dev/disk/by-id/nvme-CT4000P3PSSD8_2336E873F8BA" You have to put in nvme or ata or ssd or whatever is shown as your disk id.

 

and I'm sure you figured out the path you meant to put in was "/dev/sdf/vdisk2.img" but like I said before it will change from sdf to like sdh. SpaceInvador talks about this in the video link I posted earlier in this thread. You can also convert your vdisk into a legit NTSF format so you can pull your passthrough drive one day if you want and just run a bare metal rig down the road.

 

I attached my passthrough setup.

Edited February 3, 20251 yr by BigDaddyDingDong

Thanks BDDD. I know about the sdf , sdh, etc may change. Not a big deal in my setup as i only have one disk in passthrough, but your method is definitely better. I am interested in conversion of vdisk into NTFS. I didn't know that. Anyway, I started to regret that I upgraded to v.7. RAID is unstable. I keep loosing my cache pool. It keeps breaking down to a multiple devices and then back together again. I think it could be the reason i had my original problem with the passthrough , since when you working with VM page you don't see the dashboard and don't see the action there. I am thinking of downgrading back as it was rock solid before the upgrade. May be any wisdom from you on this?  

@BKG@BKG can you go to the "main" tab and then click on "cache" under "pool devices" and take a screenshot of your cache setup and post it? Something may have changed during the 7.0.0 update in your cache settings causing you to have problems.

 

I'm assuming you also have the unassigned devices plugin as well?

Hi, I think it is the VM that was causing the chaos. I removed the VM and re-upgraded to v.7 again and it is running fine now and without the VM. So, I am now going to install VM again and see what happens. I reported it in the bug report thread -  

 

@BKG I had the same issue when I had my cache pool set to raid 1. I removed 1 NVME prior and passed it through and never changed my cache settings. If your cache is set to Raid 1/0/jbod or any version of raid it'll assign any "loose" drive with the new 7.0.0 update for some reason. I had to make sure my cache pool was only assigned to 1 drive.

thanks. i will look into that. So far so good . testing freshly installed VM. One thing was still the same when I tried to use HDD name/serial it would not allow me to format the drive inside the VM and will freeze the VM completely, basically back to my original problem I listed here. So, I had to use /sdf and for the 2nd drive and that fixed the issue and I was able to format it inside VM and it is now working fine. I will update in a bit as I don't think enough time has passed.

35 minutes ago, BigDaddyDingDong said:

@BKG I had the same issue when I had my cache pool set to raid 1. I removed 1 NVME prior and passed it through and never changed my cache settings. If your cache is set to Raid 1/0/jbod or any version of raid it'll assign any "loose" drive with the new 7.0.0 update for some reason. I had to make sure my cache pool was only assigned to 1 drive.

mine was always setup like this

@BKGyou're set for Raid 1 so if you're only using 1 NVME for your cache pool and you want to pass through the second as a VM you'll wanna turn that off. 

and yes, cache set in raid1

 

Just now, BigDaddyDingDong said:

@BKGyou're set for Raid 1 so if you're only using 1 NVME for your cache pool and you want to pass through the second as a VM you'll wanna turn that off. 

no, I use 2 x NVMEs for cache and a separate 4TB HDD for passthrough for my VM to store files on to

@BKG ah gotcha, so you are setup for dual cache raid 1 w/ 2 SSDs

man... it's doing it again and after I ran the VM for a couple of hours. I resumed it in the bug report thread. 

Hey man, everything is working fine now. The mistake I was making was that I used just '/sdf' instead of '/dev/sdf/' so the system was writing to ram. And, if i tried yuor way with '/dev/disk/by-id/' from the beginning it would have solved it. So thanks !