Storage devices are connected to a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) switch and form an input/output virtualization (IOV) replication cluster that can be exposed to a host processor via hardware root complex interconnecting the PCIe switch to the host processor. When a failed storage device is replaced with a new storage device, the new storage device can initiate a virtual root complex that connects to those storage devices containing data that was replicated on the failed storage device, to receive and copy the data on the new storage device. This replication process does not have to involve the hardware root complex or the host processor.