> 
> 
> After months of piddling around with awful IDE disks on my machine at home,
> I went and plugged in the BT445S I'd bought with the machine, and bought
> myself a Micropolis 1-gig disk.  (roughly equivalent to the ST312000N/
> Fujitsu 2694/et al.; a 5400RPM, 8ms drive).

[rest of deleted]

I would guess on filesystem lay-out. The default parameter to newfs doesn't 
really match modern drives.

Try making your filesys with eg.: newfs -d 0 -a 4 -n 1 
I seem to recall from some testing here that especially the rotational delay
has a *significant* influence on the speed.

My system is a 486/33 w/AHA154B and among other drives a Micropolis 2210
Running iozone gives this:
	16      512     858169              526096              
	16      1024    998049              643051              
	16      2048    1002223             631910              
	16      4096    1024250             649775              
	16      8192    1012505             685623

regards
kim