As far as I can tell, there's no fix for this. It's a hard limit with Virtualbox and there's no solution or workaround. Feel free to correct me, if I'm wrong.
The thing is, I have all of my files stored on external drives (I have 3x 18 TB, 3x 12 TB, 4x 8 TB, 2x 3 TB and a 2 TB drive.) I've been running into another issue other than just the limit of how many hard drives I can connect. I'm also experiencing slow transfer speeds. When I try to watch videos, whether through Plex, Jellyfin or even directly from the share in a local video player, I get severe buffering issues. I also found out that passing through hardware encoding to Plex is a bit of a pain.
My goal with this machine was to have it pull double duty as a workstation and a media server running Plex and various related apps.
Originally, I had thought to just throw Windows, Stablebit's Drive Pool, Plex, Shoko and so on directly on it. However, for various reasons I want to get away from my reliance on Windows. I also really like the features of OMV, Mergerfs, SnapRAID and Docker.
I went with Manjaro as the host OS, simply because it appealed to me and I needed a simple way to test that the new hardware worked. I put OMV in Virtualbox because I don't have a lot of experience running VMs and VIrtualbox seemed as good as anything else to me.
I've spent the better part of a month trying to get OMV and Plex to work in the VM; most of that time was spent shuffling files around. I don't feel great about the idea of starting over at this point but I've hit a few walls here, most notably the limit on USB ports for Virtualbox.
So, my question is, can I make this VM work somehow, whether through another software like VMWare or by a fix I don't know of? Should I just give up and install OMV without the VM? Would it be better to just go back to what I know, Windows?
This thread suggested installing webtop in OMV as a way to run a desktop and OMV at the same time and I find the idea intriguing. If I install OMV without a VM, this sounds like a good approach. The only thing I find disappointing is that I liked the idea of easily being able to migrate the VM to new hardware or backup/restore it. OMV MAY NOT HAVE A DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT !!
I'm running out of spare time to play around with this. Rather than continuing to just stab in the dark, I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone has advice on where I should go with this. I've found this forum to be generally helpful with my previous problems, so I'm asking here. Any advice is greatly appreciated, thank you.