What is the best way to utilize/access a USB HDD attached to the PVE host from within a VM?

[Greg-J]

I have a 5 node cluster, each node has 250GB NVMe drives which is fine for everything I do so far. I have a single CIFS for ISOs and backups. So far this all seems to work well for me.

I now want to add a Shinobi.video VM to one of the nodes (IP camera recording software). That node happens to be an Intel NUC and adding more storage isn't an option. I have an extra 4TB USB HDD that would work perfect for this.

I would love to attach the drive to the PVE host and be able to access it from within any of the VMs, so if there as an option that allows that, this would be ideal.

Otherwise I simply want to be able to mount that drive inside one VM.

Either way, I'm very new to Proxmox and hypervisors in general so any help is appreciated.

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

If you use just Container you can use mount points to share storage.
But if VM's are involved you need a network share to share it.

I would recommend you to create a Container for a samba-server and mount the disk on the host and make it available for the container as a mount point.

Then you have access with CT and KVM to this share.

 

[Greg-J]

Hi,

If you use just Container you can use mount points to share storage.
But if VM's are involved you need a network share to share it.

I would recommend you to create a Container for a samba-server and mount the disk on the host and make it available for the container as a mount point.

Then you have access with CT and KVM to this share.

The advice that I have been given elsewhere today is that USB-passthrough is not reliable in Proxmox and that there is a different way to do it where I mount the drive in the Proxmox host and share it with the VMs. Is this not correct?

 

[wolfgang]

The advice that I have been given elsewhere today is that USB-passthrough is not reliable in Proxmox and that there is a different way to do it where I mount the drive in the Proxmox host and share it with the VMs. Is this not correct?

You have to be more specific as you write there are several methods to use a USB disk.

 

[KatyComputer]

Greg, the USB Passthru article has a good description of how to accomplish your mission.