Virtual Box Shared Folder vs Network Drive

Question

So I am currently setting up a new machine and I am trying to figure out what would be the best option in terms of read/write speed of a hard drive.

Machine A - My new machine, Windows 10

Machine B - a virtual machine running Windows 10 ON Machine A.

I currently have 4, 4TB hard drives set up in a RAID 10 configuration on my Win10 Machine A. This is going to result in roughly a 8TB hard drive. I will be installing Virtual Box and setting up Machine B with Win10.

What I need is for Machine B to access the 8TB drive on Machine A, originally I was going to do a shared folder (and just share the drive) through virtual box but upon reading a lot of forum posts about performance on the shared folders feature of virtual box I no longer think that is the best idea.

My next though would be to make the drive on Machine A accessible to any device on my network, and just access the drive on Machine B through \\Machine_A{DRIVE} and read/write to it that way by mapping it as a Network drive.

I was wondering what are the pros/cons of these two approaches and what would give me the best performance on read/write operations?

Answer 1

For anyone who ever runs across this post.

I ended up setting up Machine A's drive as a network drive and then mapping it on Machine B as a Network Drive. Was fast enough for my read/writes and it allowed me to access it from other PC's when needed.