Dismal performance

[Stefan Monnier]

Both on my old Thinkpad X30, and on my newer Thinkpad T60,
a compactflash card accessed via a PCMCIA-adapter (using a Debian
2.6.30 kernel with pcmciautils installed) gives me absurdly slow read
speeds:

   # hdparm -Tt /dev/hda /dev/hde
   
   /dev/hda:
    Timing cached reads:   368 MB in  2.00 seconds = 183.59 MB/sec
    Timing buffered disk reads:   96 MB in  3.05 seconds =  31.45 MB/sec
   
   /dev/hde:
    Timing cached reads:    92 MB in  2.01 seconds =  45.85 MB/sec
    Timing buffered disk reads:    4 MB in  3.01 seconds =   1.33 MB/sec
   #

where `hda' is an old 80GB 2½" drive and `hde' is a new 32GB
compactflash card.

Can someone give me hints how I can improve this?


        Stefan


PS: Also, why is the cached read so much slower?  I'd have expected it
to be independent from the underlying drive.