Thanks for testing it out, Fred. If you continue to experiment with both the Fusion and Parallels demos, perhaps you could let us know if you experience any important differences between the products with respect to BIAB (and, by the way, are you running Vista or XP?). I've been running BIAB 2008.5 (waiting for my 2009 upgrade) via Parallels 3.0/Windows XP on a MacBook Pro for a while now; performance is decent, but could be faster. I understand that Parallels 4.0, the version you must have downloaded, provides a significant speed increase over 3.0, but there's a lot of talk in user forums about problems with upgrading to the new 4.0 release -- could be that these affect a small minority of users, though. I'll either upgrade to Parallels 4.0 or switch to Fusion once my BIAB 2009 arrives, as the cost for an upgrade or a competitive upgrade looks about the same.
I'm glad the PG-supplied hard drive, which I'm also waiting for, is working out for you; I'd expect Parallels or Fusion to have no problem with any NTFS formatted drive. I'm thinking about reformatting the drive for Mac (HFS) once I get it, though (or moving its contents to another Mac-formatted drive), as it would seem to be a convenience to be able to write to that drive via both Windows, and directly in the Mac OS without a VM running... and the Mac OS still can't write to NTFS, no?