There's also another option: a PCI ATA66/100 card with a more modern IDE hard drive. The cards are fairly plentiful and cheap these days (probably about the same price and availability as a decent SCSI card, really), and that would bypass any BIOS limitations. A 40-80GB hard drive can also be had cheap, which would give you plenty of space and similar speeds to an average SCSI setup.

I personally like SCSI, but unless you just really want to play with it, I don't know if I'd really recommend it unless you already have some of the requisite parts on hand. Collecting together the controller, cables, drives, and possibly adapters depending on what sort of drives you get... the costs can add up quick. And it can be a little bitchy if you're not used to working with it. Noise and heat aren't so much an issue on newer drives (i.e., after 2000 or so, when they started switching to fluid dynamic bearings).

I got PCI Sata controller and running 64 GB SSD drive with windows 98 and DOS 7.1 without any issue.

Having tested heaps of gear I can also vouch for PCI controllers. I went with SATA though and notebook HDD 😀

Just keep in mind partition size limitations. I use a single 30GB FAT32 partition on a 320GB drive without any problems. You might have to use special tools like super fdisk to partition such a large drive.

I went PCI SATA controller and a 30GB OCZ Vertex SSD drive for my Compaq.

Nothing can really compare to the speed increase.

OK thanks and I am liking the pci sata option as I will have two extra 2.5 sata drives after I do some upgrades on two other systems. Thinking of using the onboard primary ide channel for cf cards as removable storage and got a decent caddy for the 2.5 sata drives (mounts two drives in a single caddy). Should I expect any installation issues for win98 if I pre-format the drives on another rig? A 120gb and a 160gb drives but want full format with only single partitions?

Yes you will have issues.

Use super fdisk to create a single 30GB partition and then install Windows 98.

Thinking of using the onboard primary ide channel for cf cards as removable storage

You can try it, but it may not work as well as you hope. For one thing, removable storage isn't very convenient when you have to power the machine off to remove it, but more importantly, a lot of older boards will refuse to boot from an add-in card if you have drives connected to the onboard IDE. My 440FX board behaves that way... it won't boot off the SCSI card with any sort of IDE hard drive connected, and I also had to put my IDE CDROM and Zip drive on the secondary channel, leaving the primary empty.

OK thanks for the heads up, I might just limit the CF card option as a slave device on secondary then. I'll just use the 120gb and make just several partitions. Lets say 30gb for boot and the rest format later will it recongnize? I normally built my past retro rigs around xp and nt so my win9x is stunted.

edit: Decided to ditch cf ide altogether

Which version of 98 are you planning to use? I'm not so familiar with the limitations of 98FE (because the last time I used it, the largest hard drive available was ~20GB), but I know for sure 98SE should have no problem with a 120GB drive, even with just a single partition.

SE and I haven't looked into unofficial updates but am aware of a few tweaks from reading other posts. I am better about hardware but software isn't my cup of tea, would be nice if the prices went down on 3dfx cards as I need to rebuild the collection.

I've played around with some of the unofficial updates for 98SE, and frankly I wouldn't bother with them. They add almost nothing in terms of features, and they just slow things down and add a lot of instability.

I consider the 98SE unofficial service pack to be essential... though it is best if you stick with the older, stable 2.1 or 3.0b4 versions. The newer versions are done by someone entirely different, and he's pretty well taken the whole project down the toilet.

I might have to try that then. Vanilla 98SE is a bit lacking for my liking. 😜

Due to a change of plans when I bought some scrap laptops the sata drives ended up being needed for something else. So I found a new in box adaptec ide controller with proper win98 support and bought some decent ide drives. A single 250gb for main storage and swap while a 6.4gb seagate for boot. The reason why that everything is that the card can only boot from the first pci slot (scsi option) but had no where else to install my voodoo rush.

Remounted the board on brass stand off instead of the silly plastic crap that was common for these AT rigs.