November 28, 2025Nov 28 HelloIs it a bad idea to plug the Unraid flash drive into a PCIE USB expansion card?Do people have experience with some USB expansion card chipsets being better than others?USB2 vs USB3 (my flash drive is USB2)?The reason is that I want to pass through a USB controller to my Windows 11 VM - I need at least 4 USB A ports but 5 or 6 would be preferable. However all my motherboard's (Asus Pro WS W680-ACE IPMI) many USB ports belong to the same controller so no matter where I plug in the Unraid flash drive on the motherboard, I can not pass through any USB controller to my Windows 11 VM. The obvious solution would be to buy a PCIE USB expansion card and pass through that to the VM. However, if I instead plug the Unraid flash drive into the PCIE card, then I don't need that many ports on the card and I can pass through the motherboard USB controller and have 10+ USB ports available for the VM.I hope someone can shed light on whether this is a good or bad idea. Edited November 28, 2025Nov 28 by Di4rnu
November 30, 2025Nov 30 Community Expert i've had no issues using expansion slots to boot unriad.its netiher good nor bad. its hardware specfic... and software specific...*There used to be a plugin to pass individual usb ports and plugged in devices...if the usb is in the pcie card being passed to the VM then that is a bad IDEA!as unraid mounts the flash drive at /boot and removing the flash drive kills and errors the OS as unraid sits in ram...Unlike proxmox with other qemu edits to passing individual usb ports. unraid is more IOMMU specific and wold require either the flash drive plugged into a mother boards port that can't be passed to the VM as the host needs forever access to it...look into the usb vm manger plugin. Edited November 30, 2025Nov 30 by bmartino1 Data
November 30, 2025Nov 30 Author 1 hour ago, bmartino1 said:i've had no issues using expansion slots to boot unriad.its netiher good nor bad. its hardware specfic... and software specific...*There used to be a plugin to pass individual usb ports and plugged in devices...if the usb is in the pcie card being passed to the VM then that is a bad IDEA!as unraid mounts the flash drive at /boot and removing the flash drive kills and errors the OS as unraid sits in ram...Unlike proxmox with other qemu edits to passing individual usb ports. unraid is more IOMMU specific and wold require either the flash drive plugged into a mother boards port that can't be passed to the VM as the host needs forever access to it...look into the usb vm manger plugin.Hi bmartino1Thanks for your reply. The idea is to have the USB in a PCIE card that is not passed through, but then pass through the motherboard USB controller instead. If I understand you correctly, it should not be an issue (at least for some PCIE cards)
November 30, 2025Nov 30 Community Expert Correct. not all cards support sriov nor have xhic / echi capabilities...
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