i have this http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013OIGJFE and I love it. It's microSD, though.

Goddamn that's a pretty sweet deal indeed. (EDIT: Oh god there are a lot of horror stories out there about Warehouse Deals, including one from this very sub D: I pray 4 u brother)

My only contribution to your questions are related to #1. Someone posted this sweet compact USB-C microSD/USB-A reader from Amazon way back when and I bookmarked it.

It looks like the perfect USB-C replacement for the Meenova Dash Micro that I used to use with my other Android phones.

This kind of solution is pretty good for storing media you want to swap on and off the internal storage (and particularly good for having off-device storage for Nandroid backups).