I'm hoping to have some light shed on passing through HDD's to a VM.

elzorroazul777

New Member
Dec 7, 2022
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I'm using a Dell Precision T7610 workstation that has 4 HDD bays and a backplane RAID controller.

I have 4 drives:
2, 4TB SAS HDD's & 2, 2TB SAS HDD's.

I have read that I cannot use a hardware and software RAID together, makes sense. Is there a way to neutralize the hardware RAID controller so that it is essentially passing through the HDD's to the motherboard?

After that is achieved, how should I go about getting the HDD to the trueNAS vm? What type of connection interface is the SAS considered with respect to Proxmox's 'add hardware' feature?

Thank you for your help!
 
Is there a way to neutralize the hardware RAID controller so that it is essentially passing through the HDD's to the motherboard?

You have to find out the exact controller-model and if there is a way to flash it to a HBA in IT-mode.

After that is achieved, how should I go about getting the HDD to the trueNAS vm?

In my opinion, the best and most reliable way is to PCIe-passthrough that whole controller to the VM then.
But in this case, the PVE-host will lose all drives connected to that controller; so all drives you do not want to have in the VM, but on the host, have to be connected to another controller!
 
After some searching, I was able to disable the hardware raid controller through the BIOS and still keep the drives online. IOMMU was preventing me from PCI passthrough. Happy to say I have that figured out now. The main OS is on a PCI m.2 ssd but is in a RAIDZ1 configuration with a sata ssd. That sata ssd is connected via sata cable to a corresponding port on the motherboard. Hopefully that sata port isn't related to the raid controller, otherwise I think it should work just fine.
 
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