Are they necessary? My Radxa (quadcore 1.7 GHz ARMv7) cannot exceed 6 MB/s read from HDD no matter how hard it tries with NTFS formatted disc (for comparison, R

Are they necessary? My Radxa (quadcore 1.7 GHz ARMv7) cannot exceed 6 MB/s read from HDD no matter how hard it tries with NTFS formatted disc (for comparison, Raspberry Pi A was doing about 600 kB/s max in a same configuration). Both are far under USB 2.0 speed.