Exactly why the time taken by 'memory reads', is not considered while calculating time complexity of an algorithm?
People don't usually refer to the hard drive as "memory" though the term "external memory" is common in this area of the literature. As far as disk accesses are concerned, they are taken into account in the analysis of algorithms that are explicitly written to access disk. Some of the more popular models are the two-level external memory model, the parallel disk model, and the cache-oblivious model. There are also hierarchical memory models. Algorithms and Data Structures for External Memory particularly chapter 2 describes the parallel disk model in detail, briefly describes other external memory models, and provides pointers into the literature. Some of these ideas and results go back about half a century.