Yes—there can be big speed differences between cheap card readers, even if they all support SDHC. From the shared experiences, some budget readers only manage around 3–4.5 MB/s, while better inexpensive USB 2.0 models can reach roughly 18–20 MB/s with suitable cards. That means the reader can easily become the bottleneck.

A few practical takeaways:

• Look for a reader with proven real-world speeds, not just broad compatibility claims.
• “Cheap” is fine, but the very cheapest generic models can vary a lot.
• A reader marketed for higher-speed cards (for example, “150x”) may perform much better than no-name slow models.
• If you want CF as well, a dual-slot or multi-card reader is the safer choice.

From the answers here, the better performers mentioned were the Transcend multi-card reader and some higher-speed bargain readers, while at least one low-cost multi-card model was much slower. So if your priority is value plus decent transfer speed, choose a reader with tested performance rather than simply the lowest price.