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The 16 TB drive won't be anywhere close to 4x faster than the 4 TB drive, though. Maybe 20% (~200 MB/s vs ~230-250 MB/s). That's because most of the capacity increase comes from more tracks and more platters, not linear density, which determines throughput.

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I would say 250-260MB/s for a 16TB drive, and when 4TB drives were newer they were more like 160-180MB/s. That's about a 50% increase.

Doing the math, you're probably going from 5 to 8-9 platters, so 2.2-2.5 areal density, and a naive square root suggests it should be about 50% faster. So maybe track width is taking a fair share after all?

Though when I look at more sizes, it seems like 12TB drives were also hitting 260MB/s and speed has almost entirely stalled since, with 24TB being only a hair faster.

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