SO WD, Seagate and Hitachi are cramming 1 more platter into the same thickness, while introing 5mm with 1 platter. All this without being Helium filled I think. Cool.
But yeah, 3+ platter laptop drives in the past have always had very slow average access times, about 20ms but their sequential transfer rates aren't bad.
Would like to see a 4 platter 12.5mm thick drive, even if slow.
The reason why they are cramming another platter in is because they are having heaps of trouble developing higher density platters and/or head technology. Hopefully HAMR will take off soon so platter density starts to go up again and sequential transfer rates very slowly see some improvement (it's an uphill battle vs density; double the density, transfer rates only increase maybe 15-20%).
If you want speed, buy an SSD. New laptops are coming with 2 and sometimes 3x mSATA SSD slots that you can RAID together for 1GB/s+ speeds!