I really, really wish I had a SATA port.
It's a 24" iMac, the first generation of that aluminum/black iMac, 4 GB of RAM, 230 GB 7200RPM HDD with 2-something ghz intel C2D. I do have a FW800 or FW400 available.
What I'm really looking for is a reassurance that external hard drive is all I need for offloading the HD works within the VM to external hard drive without slowing down the everything else (though I do expect there to be slightly more overhead and more back-forth between the processor and the hard drive... just not sure how much and whether it would justify the effort)