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The ISA bus capabilities are designed to sustain host throughput data rates of roughly 2-3MB/sec. Relative to SCSI host transfer rates of 5MB, 10MB, and 20MB/sec, the ISA bus is painfully slow for higher performance applications. Because AT personal computers did not necessarily demand the higher performance obtained by their workstation or file server counterparts, 2-3MB/sec wasn't considered a limiting factor. In addition, the ISA bus capabilities of 2-3MB/sec did not present a throughput problem because data rates coming off the media were roughly only 5Mbits/sec, and not a challenge to the host throughput.
As disk drive areal density technologies progressed, media data rates began to exceed the 2-3MB/sec ISA host throughput. Buffering either on the system or the drive was necessary to maintain performance. The industry's most recent drive offerings far exceed the ISA bus host throughput by providing media data rates of up to 48Mbit/sec. Due to these factors, increased buffering is not a cost effective alternative to faster host throughput.
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