Very slow transfer from USB pen drives/external hard drives and SD card

I have a brand new XPS L502X. I tried to upload images from a 4gb SD card. It took 55 mins! On my old IBM running XP it took 5!!! Similarly, external hard drives and USB drives are taking incredibly long times - I am going to want to transfer 10's of GB of data. This is making my machine useless for the reason I bought it (image editing) Are there any solutions?