Following up again here:

A seller on eBay is now offering Pretec brand 233X CF cards in 32GB capacity for US$114. These cards apparently read at ~35MBbytes/sec and write at ~25MBytes/sec, far faster than the early cheap CF cards.

I'll be replacing the 32GB card in my notebook with a Pretec card, to fix the agonizingly slow write speeds there, and the old slower card (reads at ~35MB/sec, writes at ~1MB/sec) will get moved to one of the empegs here.

Cheers