virtualbox.org

I have read through the forms looking for any information for connecting an external eSata drive to VirtualBox. I have a Windows XP and Ubuntu 10 Virtual machines running on my Dell E6400 laptop. I want to connect an external drive using either the built in eSata port or an eSata express card on the laptop. USB works fine but I can't find a way to connect the eSata drive.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

eSATA is not the same as USB. It can't be transferred to a VM as such. If you want to have the drive available in the VM, use shared folders, your OS native network sharing or RAW Disk. The latter will be the most dangerous, see the manual for that. It will also cause the VM to fail to boot or at least give an error when the drive it not attached or it's device path changed.

The USB passthrough feature is unusual in that it lets you directly access physical (host) devices. In general however the existence of host devices, such as an eSATA drive, is irrelevant to a virtual PC. There is as yet no eSATA passthrough feature in VirtualBox.

What you can do however is create a folder on the drive and share it. Shared folders do work with removable drives. Of course you could share the root folder, but I don't recommend sharing the root folder of any drive.

This answers my question. Thank you for the quick reply.