André,
I had planned on turning off the VM and just copying the vmdk. I'm going through the link you sent and it seems that I wouldn't need to worry about most of the items listed. I'm using ESXi 5.1 free and will only be using the drive for host backups (it'll never be presented to guests). It looks like the only extra steps I'll need to perform is the 'unmount' procedure. Does that sound right?
Also, this article talks about unmounting LUN's from a SAN from ESXi. Do you know if unmounting a single drive from an internal SATA connection on a Z77 chipset will behave the same way?
TIA!