Regarding the speed issue it was the same for me, incredibly slow. Took over 4 hours to copy about 30GB music. Avg. Speed of between 2-4 Mb/s.
Sent from my SGH-i937 using Board Express
Fortunately, the Windows 8.1 Release Preview solves this problem.
After the upgrade to 8.1 RP, the SD card was unchanged, but the auto-mount script I added to mount it as a VHD and the Explorer registry change to 'hide' the actual SD card and display only the VHD was undone. But Windows 8.1 fixes this in a way that makes the VHD method unnecessary and allows you to index content on an SD card without any hack.
On SD cards, you can now right-click a directory on the card and choose to have it indexed as in the example below: View attachment 36487
You can also add this setting another way or confirm the right-click index setting worked by opening 'Indexing Options' and choose Modify to see (or change) the current indexing settings: