NVMe passthrough vs image and M.2 drives


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I am trying to work out the best way to expand my space for VMs. I have a single M.2 slot currently with a 1TB NVMe drive, I can swap that out for a 2TB but would need to use images for everything.

Alternatively I could just purchase the extra 2TB for everything and use a PCI adapter (although that seems fraught with something called m-key and b-key?!) but for my gaming VM use pass-through on the 1TB.

 

How much performance difference would there be?

 

I am running out of space for an extra PCI card, ideally a combo USB-3/M.2 card to host the 2TB would be best but struggling to find one which support NVMe drives.

 

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Most NVMe SSDs use 4 PCIe lanes. If you plug one of these adapters into an x4 slot, there should be a negligible performance hit. After all, PCIe is PCIe, no matter what physical connector is used.

 

I don't think you can pass through a storage device to a VM. You will probably have to assign it another vdisk and put the 1TB drive as cache with the 2TB one.

Edited by Ep1cPl4yz
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