Hard Drive read speed below 2 MB/sec. Normal? How to improve?

That is very strange indeed. I have a WD1001FALS that has an average transfer rate of 91.5 MB/s. Your average of 1.8 is crazy slow. Its normal to see a strait line like yours for solid state drives, sd cards, or flash cards. Usually it is a bit higher than 1.8 MB/s though. Non SSD drives usually have a curved graph because they are able to read data on the outer rim of the platter quicker than data stored near the center of the platter (as far as I know).

A few shot in the dark ideas:

I've seen hard drives do strange things when the motherboard only supports SATA I with a SATA II drive in it. You could try putting the jumper in the hard drive to forice it down to SATA I or 1.5Gb/s.

You could try uninstalling the driver in device manager and letting windows re-install it.

You could try a different SATA and power cable.

good luck.

My guess is that there are too many files in the folder for it to display/parse well.

Does performance improve if you segment the folder to have fewer files at the root level of the directory?

An ATA drive will have a peak performance (IIRC) of 133mbps (megabit per second), or ~15MBps (megabytes per second).

SATA drives will perform substantially better - on the order of 10-40x performance (peak), so you *should be seeing up to ~650 MBps peak performance (on SATA III).