Enabling Sata passthrough to access Bluray drive from Windows VM

TrueNAS General
,
1

Hi, can someone help me please?
I have seen countless discussions where people are struggling to see devices within their environment.
Suggestions always point to enabling passthrough on the sata controller. I can see it is pretty simple to enable if you have TN Scale VM and on ESXi or something similar. But what if you have Scale installed on Physical bare metal like I have?
How do I enable passthrough on my controller?
Apologies if this has already been covered somewhere, but I can’t find it.

Cheers

2

So I have found out how to do this vPC > devices, add the sata controller but then the whole system hangs. I can no longer connect to truenas webui.
I’m guessing it’s because the optical drive is physically connected to the same sata controller as the OS ssd?

3

Another update, when I try adding the Sata Controller I see this: ‘SATA controller’: Not Available by ‘ASMedia Technology Inc.’
Again Truenas is running fine from SSD attached to this controller and the only other device connected is the Bluray drive.
Here’s a link to the product: https://amzn.eu/d/j5YWLr9

4

Boot from a NVMe drive, not SATA.
Passing the controller hands over all drives attached to it. So TrueNAS looses its boot drive… Not good.

5

Thanks. I have my cache drive set as NVMe drive. Unfortunately there’s only 1 slot on the motherboard. I may just have to look for sata to usb for the optical drive. Might be the only way to mount it.

6

You have not described you hardware, so we cannot tell if there’s a way…
And we cannot guess what you mean by “cache”, whether you nedd it and whether it is properly set up (hints: SLOG requires a Data Centre grade drive, and at least 64 GB RAM is recommended for L2ARC).

7

Ryzen 4500 6 core
Gigabyte A520I AC (limited to 4 on board sata connections)
16 Gig DDR4
x4 3TB WD Red
X1 250GB SSD (for OS)
X1 250GB m.2 (for cache, I had to dedicate a drive during initial setup, reading online at the time it was recommended to utilise the m.2 slot).
X1 asmedia a+e key to sata controller.
X1 Blu-ray optical drive

The WD reds are attached to onboard data controller.
m.2 attached to MB
SSD (OS) and optical drive attached to a+e key sata controller.

8

Yes

You dont need a “cash” drive, aka l2arc.
Boot from a nvme drive. Use your 4 sata drives for data. Then passthough your asmedia controller card with the optical drive.

1 Like
9

Ok so you’re saying I don’t need to have a cache drive at all?
I should be able to download a backup, remove the boot ssd and Install TNS on the m.2? It won’t have a hissy about me no longer having any kind of dedicated storage for cache?
I’ll give it a go tomorrow…

10
  • Remove the cash drive through the GUI
  • download the configuration file and safe it on your PC
  • remove the old boot ssd
  • reinstall Truenas on the NVMe
  • upload the configuration file
  • reboot

System should be up and running.

You dont need a cash drive, because in Truenas your ram is your primary cash.
L2arc can be benificial if you have a minimum of 64GB ram, and your ARC hit ratio is low.
L2arc needs ram so your are using up ram that could be used as cash.

1 Like
11

Most motherboards don’t allow passthrough of onboard controllers at all, becourse they are connected through the chipset in most cases.

Your best bet is a USB2SATA adaptor as you mention yourself

also when you reinstall after removing the cache drive from pool…

maybe use both your 250gb in a mirror for boot-pool, the difference in speed won’t matter much here

12

With a few chassis adjustments and configuration changes, I have managed to pass through the sata to USB and successfully and made a 1:1 bluray backup. Thanks for your help all.

2 Likes