It took me a while to figure out why my external Seagate harddrive wasn’t working on Windows 7 and VMware Fusion 5. As it turns out, VMware Fusion 5 does not support USB 3.0 with Windows 71.
What is not intuitive — and frankly doesn’t make sense — is that VMware Fusion 5 will not automatically revert to USB 2.0 to attempt to support it.
The solution to this is to run your USB 3.0 capable device through a USB 2.0 hub, such as an Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad.
See also: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/415658
0you need Windows 8, per their features list “Microsoft Windows 8 required for USB 3 support” ↩