TIL! Interesting benchmark.

I'd recommend trying bs=256k, which is what Linux is optimized for FWIW. 8k may induce overhead, but I can't say for sure how much of a difference 256k would make.

I just briefly poked eBay to find out the price of ISA disk controllers, and found a reasonable number of options within the <$30 bracket. https://www.ebay.com/b/ISA-Internal-Disk-Controllers-RAID-Ca...

The nice thing is that Linux will (almost certainly?) have no problem no matter what card you buy, so the question is what the fastest chipset is.

I also just found https://wiki.68kmla.org/SCSI_hard_disk_replacement_options#I... which may prove relevant.

Ok I can give 256K a shot next time.

Actually won't the ISA controllers be even slower? I'm not sure what bus the PATA controllers on this PC are connected to but isn't it connected "natively" so to speak? It might even compete for bandwidth with the sound and network card.

Very, very good point. I'm not sure.

Don't quote me, but I think the onboard PATA controller is connected via ISA as well.

Very likely the onboard PATA controller is connected via ISA. I had to enable the ISA PATA support during the kernel configuration for Linux to recognise it.

In this case, there probably won't be any benefit of having additional ISA controller cards.

This is very very possible.

What I wonder is whether the onboard chipset is slower than the ISA bus - and whether using an external card would eke out a tiny bit more performance.

Apparently the ISA bus can stably run at up to 8MHz.

It's not on-point but I found this thread that discussed SCSI controllers that was kind of interesting: http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=36001

This project is really awesome btw.