Disk passthrough the same as HBA passthrough?

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weust

Active Member
Aug 15, 2014
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I was thinking about HBA passthrough the way ESXi does it, and HDD passthrough the way Hyper-V does it.

With something like ZFS (FreeBSD, FreeNAS, NAS4Free) what would be more sense? HBA or HDD passthrough, or doesn't it matter as long as ZFS has direct connection to the HDD?

Not sure where I needed to ask this, here or in the FreeBSD/FreeNAS part of the forum.
 

Ch33rios

Member
Nov 29, 2016
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I've set up my homelab ESXi server to have 4 WD-Reds 'raw device mapped' to a NAS vm (the base OS vmdk is hosted on the ESXi datastore) which IMO is analogous to performing a passthrough as the VM essentially acts like it has full/direct access to the raw physical disk. I've been successfully running a BTRFS RAID10 setup for over a year now and its been flawless.

Is it better to get a hardware HBA and then do a passthrough of the PCI device? Perhaps. I'd say if I had an HBA lying around I'd have used it instead of doing RDM but since I didn't RDM was just a convenient alternative.

My experience with BTRFS was positive for 'passthrough' but everything I've read about ZFS and virtualization of the host NAS install seems to point to directly passing the ZFS drives through via an HBA card.