This is super cool! I run DevlRel @ Timescale, and I love seeing our community create well written posts like this!

My initial reaction is that I think one of the reasons you're seeing a hypertable being slower is almost certainly that it creates an index on the timestamp column by default. You don't have an index on your standard table which lets it go faster.

You can use create_hypertable with create_default_indexes=>false to skip creating the index, or you can just drop the index before you ingest data. You'll eventually want that index - but it's best created after ingestion in a one-shot load like this.

I'd also be interested in how the HDD you're reading data from is holding up in some of the highly parallel setups?