To permanently assign the device to the VM client, go to “Devices->USB->USB Settings…->Filters”, click the green icon to the right and select the device from the list (must be connected at the time).You can assign individual USB devices to the Windows client, by going to “Devices->USB” and selecting them.
“Devices->Shared Folders->Shared Folder Settings…”.You can now mount your local disks in VirtualBox by Doing:.Go to “Settings->General->Advanced” and enable “bi-directional” for both the clipboard and drag and drop.
VirtualBox is a free alternative to Parallels or VMWare that seems to have most of the same functionality, but takes a little more user intervention to get set up and make run properly. A walk through for doing this can be found here. In that video, I set the memory to 4 Gb, which can be marginal for some things, If you have enough memory, you should set it to at least 6 Gb or preferably 8 Gb. Note: some of the longer waits have been edited down in length. A video walk through of this installation can be found here, starting from scratch.