If the plan include ORDER not SORT then it read data throught index.

But if you are asking server about 1 000 000 records, what do you expect more from the server to do?

And you use 2048 page buffers then all data is retrived from your HDD. To speed up you must:

1. Change design to retrive limited number of fecords e.g. 1000.

2. Increase page buffers to speedup second and next queries.

Karol Bieniaszewski