Ingesting ExFAT and FAT over VM Ubuntu

[Seehank]

Hey guys,
I am building a rather small NAS from our little video production. We need to store data and sometimes we need to offload them from ExFAT drives to our NAS. I would like to avoid offloading over LAN since it's less convenient.

My assumption is that if I install VM Ubunto on my Freenas/Truenas server, I should be able to plug my External ExFAT drive, to my Freenas, VNC into Ubuntu where I can mount ExFat and simply drag and drop it to the place on my NAS server right? I need GUI since our users are not CLI proficient so we need something simple.

Plug in, open VNC, see my drive, copy files to the correct place.

Now I have 2 questions:
1. Simple, will this work?
2. What do you think will be the performance bottleneck of the Copy process? The VM? USB3?

Thank you for your inputs. :)

 

[sretalla]

If you're going to do that, you'll need to look into how Bhyve does devices...

Essentially, you'll need to pass in an entire USB controller (not just the disk you attach to one USB port).

To make that simpler, you should probably get a USB PCI add-in card so you can just pass it into the VM entirely, then any disk you attach to that USB will go into the VM.

Then you'll need to consider how the VM guest will talk to the storage on the host (since you can't pass that in at all), with something like NFS or SMB and a mount on the Linux guest.

You'll most likely be able to push the USB disk to its limit with a setup like that if you get the sharing and VM networking right.