If you
physically disconnect the drives, or disable the controller they're attached to at the BIOS level, then I'd say you've safely accomplished your goals.
I also get that you're doing this largely as an intellectual exercise at this point, which is fine. I'm not one to advocate that everyone should "stay in their comfort zone" or "not try new things", as you postulated might be the general case in this Forum a few replies back, and you can rest assured that most of us here make our decisions based on
logic rather than
feelings.
A fundamental challenge that runs through this entire thread, however, is the fact that it's hard to argue in terms of logical postulates when the reader (that's you) still lacks some of the more fundamental "math" required to understand those postulates. I can't truly describe the problem in terms of what windows device drivers are capable of doing, for example, without you having a solid OS internals background. Others cannot suggest using techniques like PCI pass-through in virtualization when you're not familiar with the terminology and would have difficulty in mapping an HBA or PCI graphics card into a guest OS's address space in any case, because you clearly haven't done that sort of thing before and need training in a whole host of prerequisites first.
If an analogy would help, let's pretend you walked up to a physicist at some symposium and asked why magnets worked the way they did. You'd wind up with an interview
like this (in which Feynman really isn't trying to be a dick, he's just helplessly attempting to explain how complex the topic really is). Or let's say you asked them "why
can't light escape a black hole?? That makes no SENSE!!" and the minute your hapless physicist started mentioning terms like
Schwartzchild Radius you went "Wait wait what's
that??", that physicist would know they were in for a rough ride because you're asking questions for which the only meaningful answer is "go spend at least a few months understanding the fundamental terminology and principles behind the question you are asking
before you ask the question, because right now I just can't answer it for you."
You'd likely think that physicist was being condescending and be frustrated yourself that they weren't willing to teach you fundamental physics as part of answering your question, or couldn't answer it without you having that knowledge. The physicist, in turn, would be frustrated that people who haven't even taken a couple of years worth of college physics, never mind the PhD coursework, come up to them at symposiums and ask them really complicated questions without even
knowing how complicated they are. :)
That's why this thread has been so long and occasionally heated. If you take nothing else away from it, please take that much. ;)