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

[elzorroazul777]

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!

 

[Neobin]

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!

 

[elzorroazul777]

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.