Disk drive maintaining a substantially constant host transfer rate when reading data from varying data rate data tracks across multiple disk surfaces

A disk drive is disclosed having a plurality of disk surfaces, wherein each disk surface comprises a plurality of data tracks, and each data track comprises a plurality of data sectors. When a read command is received from a host, data is read from first and second data sectors on first and second disk surfaces, respectively, in response to the read command, wherein the first data sector stores data at a first data rate, and the second data sector stores data at a second data rate substantially less than the first data rate. The data is transferred to the host at a substantially constant average transfer rate. In this manner, the disk drive does not appear abnormal to a benchmark program that reads a plurality of data sectors across multiple disk surfaces.