Passthrough a Physical HDD to a in Proxmox VE Virtual Machine

Requirements

Installed harddrives in your proxmox Machine

Configure Proxmox

To passthrough a physical HDD there are two essencial steps

Identify the HDD that should be passed
Add the HDD to the virtual machine

Identify the Drives UID

There are several ways to identify the drives and their unique IDs. The one that works out of the box is by applying the command lsblk -o +MODEL,SERIAL

Doing it like this, you will receive a list of all your detected drives


root@pve:~# lsblk -o +MODEL,SERIAL
...
NAME                         MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS     MODEL                SERIAL
sda                            8:0    0   3.6T  0 disk                 WDC WD40EFPX-68C6CN0 WD-XXXXXXXXXXX1
├─sda1                         8:1    0     2G  0 part
└─sda2                         8:2    0   3.6T  0 part
sdb                            8:16   0   3.6T  0 disk                 WDC WD40EFPX-68C6CN0 WD-XXXXXXXXXXX2
├─sdb1                         8:17   0     2G  0 part
└─sdb2                         8:18   0   3.6T  0 part
...

The essential part in the shown table is the column SERIAL - This serial is used to identify the HDD.

Identify the Drives Full Name

Now that you know which drives are available and how to identify them, you can check the full name.

All the drives and their full-names can be found in the directory /dev/disk/by-id - So just list them all with the command ls /dev/disk/by-id/

root@pve:~# ls /dev/disk/by-id/
...
ata-WDC_WD40EFPX-68C6CN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX1
ata-WDC_WD40EFPX-68C6CN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX1-part1
ata-WDC_WD40EFPX-68C6CN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX1-part2
ata-WDC_WD40EFPX-68C6CN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX2
ata-WDC_WD40EFPX-68C6CN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX2-part1
ata-WDC_WD40EFPX-68C6CN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX2-part2
...

Maybe you noticed the last part of the drives names is the same as the one listed in the initial tables SERIAL column

Create the Drives Full Path

The hardest part is already done. You identified your drives UID and its corresponding full name.

We already talked about the path, where to find the drives UIDs.

Alltogether this information allows us to create the full-path which is path + fullname

e.g.
For the drive ata-WDC_WD40EFPX-68C6CN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX1 it would be
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD40EFPX-68C6CN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX1

Add the Drive to your Virtual Machine

First identify your virtual machines ID - This could easily be found on your Proxmox WebUI. It`s a simple integer that identifies your VM.

e.g.
Lets assume a VM with the ID 100To add your driveata-WDC_WD40EFPX-68C6CN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX`, all you need to do, is just apply the following command

qm set 100 -scsi2 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD40EFPX-68C6CN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX1
update 100 -scsi2 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD40EFPX-68C6CN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX1

Or in a more abstract way

qm set <VM UID> -scsi2 <drives full path>

et voila - You mounted a phiscal drive directly to your virtual machine.

for this particular example we used the scsi2 driver, but you can also apply other like IDE or SATA. Details can be found here qm Manual in the section qm set