How well does KVM connect a physical drive to the VM?

How well does KVM connect a physical drive to the VM?

[Bill Davidsen]

I have a program which I need to run against a pile of drives. The program needs 
to boot to a dedicated machine and will only do one drive at a time, and I only 
have one machine I can tie up to use dedicated, making it a very slow process 
and requiring a manual drive change when the program is done poking in the SMART 
firmware.

I also have a 4 bay eSATA box and an evil thought, I could do this in a VM, many 
VMs perhaps, if KVM really lets the VM see the drive. I propose to do something 
like this:
   qemu-kvm -m 600 -hda /dev/sdi -cdron diskfiddle.iso -boot d

Before I try this I'd like an opinion, because while I can hot swap drives in 
the external enclosure, the enclosure warns against connecting to a powered 
computer, so I have to take a downtime.

Thanks for any educated opinions.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
   We are not out of the woods yet, but we know the direction and have
taken the first step. The steps are many, but finite in number, and if
we persevere we will reach our destination.  -me, 2010