usb to ethernet connection
 

Are these out there for sale? I was wondering about them as I thought it would be pretty to connect it to the ol'd switch and have much faster transfer speeds, anyone know of one?

You're not going to get faster speeds. The USB interface is the bottleneck.

Buy a bunch of USB add on pci cards - like 4 cards that have 4 ports each then plug all the drives into them.

yeah usb2 will limit you to about 100mbit lan speeds