What driver are you using? From my experience any of the later drivers are about the same speed for an SD card, but the early ones are pretty bad, especially the official ones.
Also I have noticed certain access patterns are just kinda slow on Blues/Zulus/etc, and a fast hard disk can still beat them in those cases. If you look at the open pulls, there's some folks who looked at significant improvements to the SD drivers, but unfortunately I think they dropped it before finishing.
They still smoke at random access though, which matters the most for most active use.
Then there's SCSI Manager 4.3 which, contrary to many internet claims, can and is be loaded at boot in 7.5+ for, I think 030+ devices? It can definitely be better in certain cases.