there are different speeds of flash memory. You can buy cheap slow ones or expensive fast ones. But no matter the speed, thats probably the simplest way to move your files, plus you have something useful out of the deal at the end of it /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif Just have patience /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
Any and all USB 2.0 things that can be 1.1 compatible are. If the necessary throughput is too high for 1.1 it won't work, but you're talking about uncompressed video or something, the drive will just throttle back. If it doesn't then it is hacked up somehow with non-standard chips and you don't want it. But it will say somewhere on the packaging.
a Ethernet crossover cable is also a great solution, but there is sometimes some voodoo to getting it to work. With better quality ethernet cards you don't even need one anymore, they discover the fact that you've got them plugged directly into another machine. So try that too if you're going to. Then you just need a compatible TCP settings on both machines, same subnet and different IP, no DHCP or anything just manually assign one. Even then though, some cards will guess wrong, and you may need to sleep one machine and wake it up after the other is setup to get them both on the same page.
USB crossovers have been pretty well explained by IsItMe above /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif Don't do it unless you get the special ones, and they are overpriced and require driver installs and just generally, you'd be better off with the USB drive.