Perf of query of large table by date?
We do 500 to 3000 inserts per second on a table, but in partitions of 1 month, and are monitoring the last 2 hours of activity. An index on the timestamp does the trick, most queries run less than a few milliseconds on our hardware.

But, we do have fast storage, many GB's of RAM and descent processors. On a single 7200rpm disk, this would be impossible.

Use EXPLAIN ANALYZE to see how your queries are executed and try to find the bottleneck. Storage is the slowest part of your system, and databases love lots of RAM.