Something tells me that the inclusion of an HDD into the data set would have altered the interpretation of the data. Given that it’s 30 for SSD and higher for remote disk, it sounds like the default of 4 is either wrong or the “what is the right value for SSD “ isn’t measured correctly

Good idea. It's an interesting historical question - when we picked 4.0 as the default ~25 years ago, how close was is to the calculated value? I was asking that myself. Unfortunately I don't have a machine with traditional HDD in my homelab anymore, but I'll see if I can run the test somewhere.

I wouldn't be all that surprised if this was (partially) due to Postgres being less optimized back then, which might have hidden some of the random vs. sequential differences. But that's just a wild guess.