> that disk read speed translates to about 3 GB/s which is well outside the range of what HDDs can achieve.

That’s PCIe 3.0 x4 or PCIe 4.0 x2, which a decent commodity M.2 NVMe SSD can use and can possibly saturate, at least for reads.

> which means that in 2026 we'll have seen 11 doublings since gigabit speeds in 2003, so we'll all have > terabit speeds available to us.

We’re not that far off. 100GbE hardware is not especially expensive these days. Little “AI” boxes with 400-800 Gbps of connectivity are a thing.

That being said, all the connections over 100Gbps are currently multi-lane AFAIK, and the heroic efforts and multiplexing needed to exceed 100Gbps at any distance are a bit in excess of the very simple technology that got us to 100Mbps “fast Ethernet”.