It's still UNIX, so it's not totally off-topic!
Before I had chance to install Ubuntu properly on a dedicated PC, I trialled it on my Win 7 laptop, using Oracle Virtual Box.
Most things worked, but one thing resolutely defeated me. I could not make any USB storage device (pen drive, ext HDD) be detected in Ubuntu. The device was being detected as being "captured" by Virtual Box, once I explicitly "ejected" and "safely removed" the device from Windows. But when I raised a support call on a Virtual Box forum, I was told that there was no evidence in the log files of me plugging the device in, whereas when the support engineer tried it on his machine, he got various lines showing that his device had been detected. He seemed to lose interest at this point, whereas I'd say that it proves the very point that I'm making, and is likely to be the root cause of my problem, and so needs further probing.
It's all rather academic now that I don't need to run Ubuntu as a guest OS, but I'm curious to know whether I was doing anything wrong and whether other people have had it working.