What's the best way sharing drives between Windows and Proxmox?

[leonheartx1988]

Hello.

I have the following desktop PC:

• 2x4TB SSDs
• Intel Core i7 9700 (its old)
• 128GB RAM
• NVidia RTX 4070 Ti

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...-9700-processor-12m-cache-up-to-4-70-ghz.html

and I switch between Proxmox and Win

There are times where I need to access my Windows Disk on Proxmox, what's the best way of mounting it?
Is there any danger of mounting my drive read/write if I'm careful? I'm planning using SMB on the Windows drive.

Also for the HDD for sharing data between the operating systems, is NTFS fine? should I go for exFat for better compatibility?


I'm also considering discarding dual boot and boot Windows as a VM with GPU Passthrough however I'm concerned about perfomance in Video Games, do I get the same?

I also know that there are some MMORPGs that hate VMs but I don't really care about those. I'm only interested in single video games

 

[Kingneutron]

> There are times where I need to access my Windows Disk on Proxmox, what's the best way of mounting it?

Only mount it read-only for safety. And have backups. Yes, there is always a chance of corruption if you mount any filesystem R/W in another operating system that isn't native to it.

> should I go for exFat for better compatibility?

Stay well away from exfat if you value your data, there is no repair program for it and forums are full of horror stories about people who got burned trying to use it, and of course no backup.

If you want to get rid of dual boot, do a p2v conversion of your Win10 with Veeam free agent and restore it into a VM.
That way you'll have a bare-metal backup, Windows will be sandboxed, and you won't risk compromising the Win10 bare-metal install.

Sharing files between OS is a solved question - it's called NAS. DON'T TRY TO DO IT ALL ON ONE MACHINE.

You can setup an old quad-core laptop with 4-8GB RAM, 1Gbit network, 1TB SSD and ZFS, and have a Samba shared drive with snapshots and ransomware protection. And you can then access your files with all 3 major OS - OSX/MacOS, Linux and Windows (and probably Android as well) without having to worry about what environment you're booted into.

 

[leonheartx1988]

> There are times where I need to access my Windows Disk on Proxmox, what's the best way of mounting it?

Only mount it read-only for safety. And have backups. Yes, there is always a chance of corruption if you mount any filesystem R/W in another operating system that isn't native to it.

> should I go for exFat for better compatibility?

Stay well away from exfat if you value your data, there is no repair program for it and forums are full of horror stories about people who got burned trying to use it, and of course no backup.

If you want to get rid of dual boot, do a p2v conversion of your Win10 with Veeam free agent and restore it into a VM.
That way you'll have a bare-metal backup, Windows will be sandboxed, and you won't risk compromising the Win10 bare-metal install.

Sharing files between OS is a solved question - it's called NAS. DON'T TRY TO DO IT ALL ON ONE MACHINE.

You can setup an old quad-core laptop with 4-8GB RAM, 1Gbit network, 1TB SSD and ZFS, and have a Samba shared drive with snapshots and ransomware protection. And you can then access your files with all 3 major OS - OSX/MacOS, Linux and Windows (and probably Android as well) without having to worry about what environment you're booted into.

Thanks for your answer.
I already have a TrueNas machine for storing my data. But its capped at 1 Gbit. For faster speeds, I'm sharing a drive between OS.

I read a couple of posts about GPU passthrough, I think I'll ditch windows and I'll use both disks in Raid mirror nfs for redundancy which will run Proxmox and all VMs .