UNRAID USB PCI passthrough

[Sniperfox47]

This may be a stupid question but I've been considering picking up a copy of UNRAID to play around with on my home setup and wasn't unsure about something.

 

I've seen a lot of posts about adding a PCIe USB card and passing it through to your guest OS for plug and play USB, but can you do it the other way around, or will you run into issues?

 

Ideally I would love to add a PCIe USB controller to plug the UNRAID drive into, and pass through the native root controller to my main VM to take advantage of the higher shared bandwidth of the native root controller.

 

Has anybody here played around with this at all and could let me know how well it works before I drop on a copy of UNRAID?

[jj9987]

I don't think passing through the board's own controller will give any speed boost. It may give you more headache than it is worth it.

I don't have a card to test it, but logically this would be my guess.

[Sniperfox47]

6 minutes ago, jj9987 said:

I don't think passing through the board's own controller will give any speed boost. It may give you more headache than it is worth it.

I don't have a card to test it, but logically this would be my guess.

Is the onboard controller for z270 not full-blown  superspeed connections for all 10 supported USB ports? Versus enough bandwidth for 3 superspeed clients plus a few fullspeed and highspeed clients  over a 4x PCIe link?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Sniperfox47 said:

PCIe USB controller to plug the UNRAID drive into, and pass through the native root controller to my main VM to take advantage of the higher shared bandwidth of the native root controller.

No you can't.

 

You can't passthrough the boot device.

 

It won't make a difference though, the whole os is loaded on ram.\

 

Id suggest using something like fedora linux or centos, and its free and is the same thing as unraid but more flexiable.

 

You don't need much bandwidth on the boot driv.e

[Sniperfox47]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

No you can't.

 

You can't passthrough the boot device.

 

It won't make a difference though, the whole os is loaded on ram.\

 

Id suggest using something like fedora linux or centos, and its free and is the same thing as unraid but more flexiable.

 

You don't need much bandwidth on the boot driv.e

...That's exactly why I said that the PCIe USB card would be used as the boot device, rather than the native USB controller...

 

And the point of passing through the USB controller is for plug and play support in the VM.

[Electronics Wizardy]

29 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

...That's exactly why I said that the PCIe USB card would be used as the boot device, rather than the native USB controller...

 

And the point of passing through the USB controller is for plug and play support in the VM.

Yep you can do that. 

[LinusTech]

Some high end motherboards also have multiple USB controllers onboard. Like the Intel one and an Asmedia one. 

 

Though this is more true of last gen boards since Z170/Z270 finally have a decent number of ports that run off the chipset. 

[Sniperfox47]

22 minutes ago, LinusTech said:

Some high end motherboards also have multiple USB controllers onboard. Like the Intel one and an Asmedia one. 

 

Though this is more true of last gen boards since Z170/Z270 finally have a decent number of ports that run off the chipset. 

Yeah, the z270 classified K is all native. I'm not sure about the thunderbolt 3 port yet since it's not even mentioned in the manual, but definitely all the USB 3.0/2.0 ports which I could use for UNRAID boot are native.

 

If I'm making a dual boot Windows/Linux VM though I'd prefer to pass through most of my native IO to that and have the other little VMs and services run off an extension card. I just don't know if UNRAID does any weird stuff that it expects to be booted off of an integrated controller.