VirtualBox is not a VMware product, but one from Oracle.
Anyway, afaik to attach an external device to a VirtualBox VM, you'd add an USB controller to the VM, and from there you can select devices that you want to mount to the VM.
You still haven’t said which VMware product you are thinking of using (or are already using) - that’s like posting on a Microsoft forum and not saying that you are asking about an Xbox, Word, Azure, Hyper-V, a Surface Pro, and so on...
Your initial question was "How to add an external hdd?", and now you are saying that it is connected via SATA II, which is more of an internal connection?
Please explain exactly what you have, and what you are trying to achieve.
So the problem is the following ... I have a 3TB disk that ran a windows7. A program was running on this system that handled the part over 2 TB, as this was the only way to access it. This disk had a windos 10 update that broke down. Therefore, win10 is running from another disk. So I thought that with an emulated win7 if I can insert the disk in question then maybe I can access that missing part.
I think it actually depends on the software/driver that was used to access the third TB. IMO it's more a question of that software's capabilities, rather than using the disk in a virtual, or physical environment.
