procedure for ejecting external hard drive from virtual machine

[Sossity]

If I have an external hard drive being accessed from a windows virtual machine in parallels, & I want to exit windows & parallels, is it crucial that I eject the external hard drive through the virtual machine? in my case windows xp, before stopping my virtual machine & quitting parallels?

 

[balamw]

is it crucial that I eject the external hard drive through the virtual machine? in my case windows xp, before stopping my virtual machine & quitting parallels?

Crucial? Probably not.

Stopping the VM (particularly shutdown) should flush the cache.

You could disable the write cache (Optimize for quick removal) in XP to reduce the chance for data corruption at the cost of some performance on writing.

B