Generally speaking, the sustained speed of a Compact Flash card isn't as important as the 4K read/write speed when used as a windows hard drive. Unfortunately 4K read/write isn't always proportional to the maximum speed and isn't normally listed as part of the spec so the only way to determine that is to test it yourself using something like CrystalDiskMark. That being said, what's the maximum speed of your IDE interface as there is no point in getting something that's faster than that. If you are using old hardware then it might be limited to 66 or 100MB/s anyway so wouldn't even be able to take advantage of any faster burst speed.

Actually, unless you stream large files or plan to do video recording, you won't notice a difference. What gives you a huge speed increase over a HDD is the almost not-existing access time, not sequential read/write speed. Even slow CF cards will run Win98 smoothly.

Are you sure they're advertised as 160 gigabit per second? They are normally measured in megabytes per second. 160 Megabytes per second would be far faster (sustained speed) than Windows 98 would ever really be able to make use of. As mentioned, that isn't really indicative of the random read\write performance, but when the advertised max transfer rate is capable of transferring the entire operating system in 2 or 3 seconds, its probably overkill. Also, as mentioned, your drive controller is probably limited to 33MB\sec or 66MB\sec depending on the board you're using.

Oops. I meant mb/s.

My interface is a Ultra ATA 133. It seems like the 120mb/s makes more sense. I'll give it a try. Thanks!

Software which runs in Win98 was meant for the 5 - 33MB/s drives of those days. 8X CD drive is only 1MB/s.