I'm surprised to see such a low speed. With a 3.5" HDD, CD Rom and SD card reader and no buffered interface I get about 3.2 Megabytes/sec from the HDD according to Sysinfo 4.4. My HDD is formatted with PFS. The SD reader gives me less than 1 MB/sec but there are so many different variables compared to my HDD - as well as cheap ebay hardware, I tend to use SD cards formatted with FAT as a way getting files to/from PCs.*
I used to run IDEFix but swapped to AtapiMagic when I upgrade to OS 3.2, but this made little difference to the speed measures.
* I now have a project for this weekend - use a decent SD card and test the speed with different file systems. I'll post the results here.