How to PassThrough SATA Drives to a VM

[vikest]

Is it possible to passthrough all SATA physical drives to a specific VM? I've done PCIe passthrough, but SATA isn't showing up as an option, it's there but grayed out, and I'm able to use the drives for VMs.

This is on an Intel VROC RAID 0 config, but it's a stupid Intel system as it allows the OS to see the individual drives, so ESXi support becomes a bigger problem as they only support RAID1. I can also try it without the RAID, but that would rely on the VM to handle RAID which isn't ideal.

[ptarnawski]

Hey @vikest 

it is possible to passthrough all SATA physical drives to a specific VM. However, it may not be possible to do so on your specific system, as it appears that the SATA controller is not configured to allow passthrough.

To check if passthrough is possible, you can try the following steps:

1. Boot your system into the BIOS or UEFI.
2. Find the SATA controller settings.
3. Look for an option to enable passthrough for the SATA controller.
4. If the option is not present, then passthrough is not possible for your system.

If passthrough is possible, then you can follow these steps to passthrough the SATA drives to a VM:

1. Power on your system and boot into ESXi.
2. Open the vSphere Client.
3. Right-click on the VM that you want to passthrough the SATA drives to and select "Edit Settings".
4. In the "Hardware" tab, click on the "Add" button and select "Hard Disk".
5. In the "Hard Disk" dialog, select the "Physical Disk" option and select the SATA drive that you want to passthrough.
6. Click on the "OK" button.

The SATA drive will now be passedthrough to the VM. You can verify this by checking the VM's settings.

If you are unable to passthrough the SATA drives to the VM, then you can try the following:

• Try disabling the RAID controller in the BIOS or UEFI.
• Try creating a new RAID 1 array with the SATA drives.
• Try using a different SATA controller.