Slow transfer for USB card readers?

Hello, I've been having a problem that I can't quite pinpoint the issue on. I have a digital camera and a sandisk CompactFlash card reader, so I don't use up the batteries. However, to copy files from the CF card to my desktop, the transfers rarely ever go above 32KB/sec. It doesn't matter if I plug the card reader into my machine directly into a USB port on the motherboard or into a 4-port hub. Is there any reason for this or any way I can improve the transfer speed? I'm currently running SuSE 7.3, kernel 2.4.16 from SuSE's FTP servers. Let me know if you need more info. Thanks. - Greg