I had an old Dell Latitude D810 on which I ran Win XP as both host and guest under Workstation 6.0, and had USB 2.
Unfortunately after 8 years good use the screen packed in so I was forced to buy another laptop.
This time I chose a Samsung 550P7C. It came with Win 8 and USB3 plus USB2 ports.
I use VM solely to avoid time-consuming installation and software compatibility problem.
Thinking the move to the Samsung would be simply a matter of copying my VM's over and reinstalling VM Workstation I couldn't have been more wrong. I've spent a considerable length of time to date attempting to get things working with no solution in sight. First I upgraded to Workstation 6.5 as guests under 6.0 kept crashing with screen compatibility problems. None of my USB devices worked properly so I installed Workstation 9 as a trial.
My printer HP1015 (USB2) takes 120 seconds to print a picture (Before it would take 5 seconds).
My scanner Canon 210 (USB2) takes 90 seconds to scan a page at 200 dpi (before it would take 10 seconds).
My Seagate Backup Plus Desktop USB 3 external drive is not visible, but hangs the guest until it is unplugged. (Before, on the old system, the drives contents would be visible after 20 seconds in the guest). Also the sound from the guest is terrible being all broken up unlike on the old Dell.
The lack of scanner functionality is what affects me the most. I've tried installing the latest scanner driver (within the XP guest), upgrading VM machine hardware compatibility to 9, installing the latest VMware tools, connecting the USB devices through USB2 cable, connecting the scanner to each USB3 port then to each USB2 port, disabling the host xHCI driver (and re-enabled), rebooting the guest for each combination, changing the VM USB controller compatibility from USB2 to USB1.1 (even tried USB3, but drivers were needed for the guest, and there are none for Intel under XP. Also there only seems to be the one USB3 driver on the host - the host USB driver provided by Microsoft - UCX01000.SYS, USBXHCI.SYS & USBHUB3.SYS File version 6.2.9200.16384 (win8_rtm.120725-1247) seems to be the latest version - I've updated Windows 8 with all the updates available.
I would be very grateful for any suggestions.