I bought one of these on sale last year: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226227 I get similar (if not better) speeds on a 3.0 port. Things are crazy fast. The large size is useful for toting around CD isos for IT related work.

I second reading Steven Pinker's books. "The stuff of thought" goes into detail on the nature/nurture debate and basically destroys it. More people need to read his books. From a programmer's perspective, it is quite fascinating to think about our minds in terms of compilers that take outside phenomenon such as time, space, or movement, and output a language that illustrates those and more complex phenomenon to other people.