Optimizing for writes. Data integrity not critical

[Steve Bergman <steve(at)rueb(dot)com>]

Hi,

I am using postgresql in small (almost trivial) application in which I 
pull some data out of a Cobol C/ISAM file and write it into a pgsl 
table.  My users can then use the data however they want by interfacing 
to the data from OpenOffice.org.

The amount of data written is about 60MB and takes a few minutes on a 
1200Mhz Athlon with a single 60MB IDE drive running Fedora Core 3 with 
pgsql 7.4.7.  I'd like to speed up the DB writes a bit if possible.  
Data integrity is not at all critical as the database gets dropped, 
created, and populated immediately before each use.  Filesystem is ext3, 
data=ordered and I need to keep it that way as there is other data in 
the filesystem that I do care about.  I have not done any tuning in the 
config file yet, and was wondering what things would likely speed up 
writes in this situation.

I'm doing the writes individually.  Is there a better way?  Combining 
them all into a transaction or something?

Thanks,
Steve Bergman