I've been developing with Visual Studio 2012 on a PC running Windows 8 64bit. I store my projects on an external, WD Passport USB3 drive. No problems with this combination. I recently bought a MacBook Air w/8GB for those occasions when I need to develop on the road. I installed Parallels Desktop, gave my VM 4 GB and half the cores and then installed Windows 8 x64 with Visual Studio 2012 (I had heard good things about this combination for .NET development). I plugged in my Passport, assigned it to the VM and began developing. My issue is that there have been problems (serious ones) with this setup. I don't know who or what is at fault (could be me, could be VS, could be Windows, could be the MacOS, could be WD and, of course, could be Parallels), but I have had file corruption issues on the Passport on 2 separate occasions. Fortunately I am anal about backups and, while I lost a bit of code, it was nothing that couldn't be resurrected. I CAN tell you that I never unplug the Passport before I shut down the VM and then the computer and I CAN tell you that I've never had this problem on the PC. I even have ANOTHER PC on which I've created a VMWare VM with the same setup and I've never had these issues (although, granted, with VMWare the Passport only operates at USB2 speeds). So my questions are, first: Does anyone use this kind of setup to develop with and have you experienced these kinds of problems? Second, are there protocols (in addition to waiting until everything's "off" before unplugging the Passport) to observe; e.g. not plugging in the WD until the VM is started? Right now I'm not sure what to do but I can't risk this kind of thing happening again. Thanks for any pointers (I love to learn, BTW, so I'm willing to read anything relevant you can refer me to). Norman
