RAID Cards for PCI Passthrough?

[SqueemTopology]

Hello,

I think an old Adaptec ASR 8405 card I have cannot handle PCI passthrough without vfio resetting repeatedly and crashing the host. The GPU passthrough works fine and IOMMU groups are all unique. After a few days of attempts and reconfigs, I’m ready to try a different HBA card.

Preferably something that has SFF-8643 connectors and can handle 12 x 7200RPM SATA HDDs - for personal Linux ISO storage.

I’m new to the homelab scene. Humbly asking for wisdom before looking around.

link to the hardware probe: HW probe of Supermicro X11DPL-i (Super Server) #f1fe2f7f24

It was an old Orchid VMS server sold by IPconfigure.com

Thank you, and happy holidays!

[mathew2214]

What is the end goal here? Is the VM going to be handling an array of some kind? Or do you simply need to expose some mass storage to the guest?

[SqueemTopology]

Hi Mathew,

I’m hoping to pass the drives individually into a VM running something like TrueNAS for ZFS and file shares for other VMs and clients over the network.

[mathew2214]

in that case, it might be easier to pass the drives to the VM by serial number and expose to the VM via virtio-blk or virtio-scsi

[wertigon]

If you have an x4 PCIe slot, this combo should give you x18 SATA slots on a single PCIe x4, will set you back ~$150 though:

Amazon.com: GLOTRENDS PA20 Dual M.2 NVMe to PCIe 3.0 X4 Adapter with PCIe...

Amazon.com: Xiwai NGFF NVME M-Key PCI Express M.2 to SATA 3.0 6Gbps 9 Ports...

[SqueemTopology]

Wow!

@mathew2214 that worked like a charm.

I followed this guide from TechHut:

- YouTube

Added 11 HDDs through the console via nano /etc/pve/qemu-server/.conf

my TrueNAS VM config in Proxmox:

root@pve28255:~# cat /etc/pve/qemu-server/100.conf
agent: 1
balloon: 0
bios: ovmf
boot: order=scsi0;net0
cores: 4
cpu: host
efidisk0: nvme-zfs:vm-100-disk-0,efitype=4m,size=1M
machine: q35
memory: 16348
meta: creation-qemu=10.1.2,ctime=1766853609
name: TrueNAS
net0: virtio=BC:24:11:2B:64:A8,bridge=vmbr0,firewall=1,tag=35
numa: 1
ostype: l26
scsi0: local-zfs:vm-100-disk-0,iothread=1,size=64G,ssd=1
scsi1: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500e4efc7a2,serial=5000c500e4efc7a2,iothread=1,size=1953514584K
scsi10: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500e36c0dfc,serial=5000c500e36c0dfc,iothread=1,size=1953514584K
scsi11: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500e4f23d80,serial=5000c500e4f23d80,iothread=1,size=1953514584K
scsi2: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500e4f28436,serial=5000c500e4f28436,iothread=1,size=1953514584K
scsi3: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500e4ea11d5,serial=5000c500e4ea11d5,iothread=1,size=1953514584K
scsi4: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500e35b533e,serial=5000c500e35b533e,iothread=1,size=1953514584K
scsi5: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500e36c3c9a,serial=5000c500e36c3c9a,iothread=1,size=1953514584K
scsi6: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500e36c2c2d,serial=5000c500e36c2c2d,iothread=1,size=1953514584K
scsi7: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500e36c2df0,serial=5000c500e36c2df0,iothread=1,size=1953514584K
scsi8: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500e35b5743,serial=5000c500e35b5743,iothread=1,size=1953514584K
scsi9: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500e4f1d4da,serial=5000c500e4f1d4da,iothread=1,size=1953514584K
scsihw: virtio-scsi-single
smbios1: uuid=e7f223c2-0cbc-4f8a-84af-da1a74c94e4b
sockets: 2
vga: qxl

Now time to set up the pool and shares.

@wertigon

These are very cool! I may end up ditching this long 2u case and backplane for a nicer 5u and using that to connect the drives for pci passthrough.

Thank you for your help!