Well, I'm not 100% sure if this is why you are having the result, but if you are reading from a drive, you actually have to find the data written to it (unless your cache is warm, but it usually isn't). If you write, the disk or the raid card or the open-e target system itself may buffer your write. With a 16GB test file, you might have half of that cached by the open-e system itself, and parts of the rest of it cached by the raid card and the disks. Also, by being able to cache more of it, the system might be able to more efficiently stream data to the disks.

We have deployed systems with 16GB or over of ram that can be used for caching, so it may be cached. I don't know how much ram you have.

Try the same thing with a larger test file. Also, try using different blocksizes in dd.