Constant I/O failures on passthrough USB drive

[command.com]

I have a VM (Ubuntu 22.04) with an external USB drive passthrough'd into it as a storage area. The VM is used mostly to run a torrent on large datasets (machine learning, not what you thought) - we are talking dozens of Gbs and as of recently, the VM became practically unusable, as it locks up literally within 15 minutes due to I/O error.

What it looks like is that I would fire up the VM, which would in turn start the BitTorrent client (at 2-5 Mbps download) with all data for the client located on the passthrough disk (etx4 FS, tried both HDDs and SSDs, all USB powered, no external power supply). Eventually, the VM would lock up in "io-error" status, occasionally showing some kernel-level error messages about the device (in VM that is). Also, occasionally, this would render the external drive no longer recognized by the host machine itself, so I would have to reboot the host.

This started a couple of months ago and was initially not very frequent, so I blamed the bad hard drive. But now it happens every 15 minutes under heavy download activity, so I wonder what could be causing it. Unfortunately, the box (one of the SFF Minisforum models) doesn't have sufficient internal space to not rely on an external drive.

I wonder if anyone experienced something similar...

 

[zzz09700]

Well I have seen this one a lot, both with ESXi and other hypervisors.

Usually passthrough a USB controller to your VM solves the problem, however the built-in USB controller from PCH/SOC may not eligible for passthrough so you may need a PCIe-USB addon card.

 

[command.com]

Well I have seen this one a lot, both with ESXi and other hypervisors.

Usually passthrough a USB controller to your VM solves the problem, however the built-in USB controller from PCH/SOC may not eligible for passthrough so you may need a PCIe-USB addon card.

Thanks - I tried it, replacing disk passthrough with the controller passthrough. It is marginally more stable but still results in FS errors after some 30 minutes of operation (and the disk stops being recognized by the system necessitating reboot).

I've switched temporarily to an "RPi 3 + USB flash drive" solution, which is slow as molasses and inelegant but at least it does the job. Hope some solution will eventually appear...