Spansion Flash programming time

I'm using the PCIe Stratix II GX Devkit that has the 512M Spansion flash on board.

It takes 25 minutes to program a .pof!

I'm a brand new Altera user (long time Xilinx user), and it takes less than 5 mins to program PROMs on my Xilinx boards. Is 25 minutes considered normal? Maybe there's some setting that I'm not enabling to make it faster.

One thing I noticed is that the programmer is doing sector by sector erase. Maybe Altera programmer should use this command instead of the sector erase? I wonder if that'll make it faster.