PCIe USB3 Cards Passthrough help


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I've tried a couple PCIe USB3 cards being passed through to a Windows 10 VM but the cards don't reset properly/survive a VM reboot and the entire unraid box has to be rebooted to reset the USB3 card.

 

Has anyone found a USB3 add-on card that plays nice with KVM?

Edited by jbartlett
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This may also be caused by not having your motherboard BIOS setup correctly... Make sure that you disable "Compatibility" boot modes in your BIOS, on my asus board this is called "CSM"...  This will force UnRaid to boot UEFI, so make sure you turn on UEFI boot on the UnRaid flash settings before you do that...

 

Also make sure that the IOMMU groups are working correctly on your system, Intel VT-d or the AMD version on your board...

 

If it is not either of those, you may have gotten a cheap card that doesn't acknowledge the reset signal that the VM sends it, thus requiring the reset sent from the host motherboard to be able to connect to a VM again...

Edited by Warrentheo
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Update: Doing some research, I found on another forum people having success with the Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.0 PCIe card. It has four controllers, one for each USB3 port, so all four USB ports can transfer data at full speed. USB3 cards with only one controller for 4 ports would experience slower speeds in the same balls-to-the-wall scenario. Found some on eBay in the $70 range. Each controller can be passed to a different VM or the entire card to one VM.

 

Will be testing this under unraid when they come in.

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2 hours ago, jbartlett said:

Update: Doing some research, I found on another forum people having success with the Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.0 PCIe card. It has four controllers, one for each USB3 port, so all four USB ports can transfer data at full speed. USB3 cards with only one controller for 4 ports would experience slower speeds in the same balls-to-the-wall scenario. Found some on eBay in the $70 range. Each controller can be passed to a different VM or the entire card to one VM.

 

Will be testing this under unraid when they come in.

The allegro pro works like magic as evidenced by the multiple people running one here- but it looks like they stopped making it.   

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7 hours ago, jbartlett said:

Update: Doing some research, I found on another forum people having success with the Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.0 PCIe card. It has four controllers, one for each USB3 port, so all four USB ports can transfer data at full speed. USB3 cards with only one controller for 4 ports would experience slower speeds in the same balls-to-the-wall scenario. Found some on eBay in the $70 range. Each controller can be passed to a different VM or the entire card to one VM.

 

Will be testing this under unraid when they come in.

Would you mind sharing the link? All the pro versions I found are more than double that. Plenty of plain allegro's at that price, but no pro versions that I could find.

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