Grabbed one of these (i think it was cheaper, but it was this cable:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-2-0-SATA-IDE...=item45fc812e02
) which is a JMicron usb-ata chipset, does 2.5, 3.5 and sata, but needs external power (standard 5/12 disk connector) for 3.5 and sata. well, the empeg has a 2.5. no external power, just popped it onto my usb bus, opened a VM in Fusion, mapped the USB device to it, and rsync'd the data on. no problem.

took about 7 hours to get it all on, which was usb2->server->100mb->laptop->vm->usb2. something like 200gb.