virtualbox.org

Hello.

I understand Virtualbox cannot use an external drive (esata), only usb.

Is this true, and if so is there a workaround or anything announced to enable esata support ?

I'm using Virtualbox (current) puel , Debian testing amd64 linux.

Thank you.

No eSata because it's similar to a normal SATA connection. SATA is on most cases hot-pluggable, or at least, made that way, but doesn't always work. eSata is the fixed version for that.
If you want to have your external hard drive in VB so badly, connect it through USB or use RAW Disk Access, though the latter will take some additional work. See the manual for that.

Thank you Sasquatch.

Also, regarding storage of .vdi...

Is there a large performance difference between using;
1. iscsi partition
2. iscsi image file offered as a block device (i.e. vbox01.iscsi.img)

I'm not sure which is best to use for storage of VBox harddisk .vdi
I am interested in the advantage of being able to move an .img
file around the network easily but not if it is less stable or severely
affected by a speed hit.

I wish to use these .vdi from a remote guest running Virtualbox,
offered as iscsi targets.

Thanks again.

i don't see why you can't have your vdi (or raw disk) on an esata drive, its mounted the same was as an internal drive, virtualbox won't know the difference.

of course hotswap won't work - you won't be able to plug it and unplug it like a usb drive.

in my opinion there's not much difference between esata and iscsi - esata should be faster, but both only allow one machine at a time to be connected and issue scsi commands directly to the disk like an internal drive.