Drive Not Recognized in VMware Fusion 11

So I have a new external SSD. Bought the Samsung 970, MacOS recognizes it with not problem, but VMware running Win 10 Pro will not.
I’ve tried many many many suggestions. Formatted the drive even on a windows machine and still will not be recognized.
Any suggestions?

Hi,

Thanks for reaching out to us, I am sorry this is not working a expected.

Support for VMware goes beyond the scope of our support but I will do my best to help! For this setup VMware must be capable of passing the USB device to the Windows Virtual Machine, VMware provides some details regarding device passthrough here ( https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1022290 ). Based on this article there may be a few sticking points blocking the drive from being passed to the Virtual Machine depending on the host software version.

For example an older version of VMware will only be able to pass through USB 2.0 devices, this may require connecting the enclosure to a USB 2.0 controller, however read and write speed will be severely reduced. Alternatively ESXi may need to have the USB 3.0 (xhci) module loaded in order to pass through USB 3.0 device correctly.

Are you able to pass through other USB 3.0 devices, for example a USB 3.0 thumb drive or external hard drive? Does the Windows Virtual Machine detect these devices as USB 3.0 and operate the devices at USB 3.0 speeds?

Thank you,

Pat
Plugable Technologies

Hello Pat, thanks for the quick reply. I’ll start off by answering the easy questions first.

“Are you able to pass through other USB 3.0 devices, for example a USB 3.0 thumb drive or external hard drive?”

Yes, the virtual machine recognizes the thumb drives as a USB 3 device as expected.

However it may be useful to know that the thumb drive is displayed differently within the file explorer window than the USB C NVMe enclosure, when connected to a non-virtual windows 10 install. For example the USB drive can “eject” where the USB C NVMe drive can not be ejected.

“Does the Windows Virtual Machine detect these devices as USB 3.0 and operate the devices at USB 3.0 speeds?”

As mentioned above it is recognized as USB 3 thumb drive, and a simple USB test shows speeds that are acceptable for USB thumbdrives, nothing crazy fast.

Also when connecting the drive and selecting to connect to the virtual machine I receive the message The device ‘Logitec JMS583’ was unable to connect to its ideal host controller. Maybe this additional information may help troubleshoot the situation.

Hi,

Thanks for the additional details!

For the Virtual Machine, I found this knowledge base article from VMware ( https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1027964 ) that speaks to this specific error message ( minus the specific hardware name ).

For the USBC-NVME not ejecting on Windows, this is often caused by the operating system actively using the NVMe SSD in the enclosure, or believing it to be a system disk when it is not, this can be caused if the NVMe SSD was previously used as an operating system drive from another computer. However I have also seen this affect new drives connected to one system while another prompts for safe removal like normal and may be a system specific issue.

Please let me know if this helps,

Thanks,

Pat
Plugable Technology

Hello,

We’re closing this thread due to inactivity, but if you have any further questions please feel free to contact support@plugable.com and we’ll be happy to help.

Thanks,

Pat
Plugable Technologies
support@plugable.com

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