The motherboard limit might be something to consider too...

I've been using 120gb drives no problem, although after installing win98 I've noticed I had to mount the drive and grow the partition using another OS. Remember there's a 4gb limit in FAT32 for individual file size, so music is probably good- movies or zip archives, watch out.

Everything I keep reading says the theoretical limit is 8tb, although some tools in windows like scandisk/defrag have a limitation of 127.53gb for the partition size.

http://techcosupport.com/press/maximum-size-o … t-32-partition/

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/184006

Good luck!

Yeah I want to use it for music primarily

I can recommend this, although it is commercial software with a serious price tag (but you have support from the author)

http://rloew.x10host.com/Programs/Patchtb.htm

AFAIK the 4 GB file size barrier is Win9x kernel-based, so even if you install Paragon or DiskInternals NTFSReader you will not be able to play larger than 4GB files.

Around 120 GB or so built in support. For something much larger just connect to a network share. I can access 4 TB that way 😁

Well I installed Win 98 SE on 32GB partition on ~1,67TB size of actual 4TB drive... so yeah 😀
I kinda cheated tho since I did use PCI SATA controller, but still - it worked fine 😉
YT video of it for anyone interested : LINK
And yes I know it's possible to do 32GB+ partitions, I just wanted to avoid pushing my "luck" too far in this case.

Windows 98SE supports up to 128GiB, the 28bit LBA addressing limit.

NJRoadfan wrote:

Windows 98SE supports up to 128GiB, the 28bit LBA addressing limit.

Isn't that just a BIOS limitation?

I often link to http://toastytech.com/guis/miscb2.html, which shows Windows 95 running on a 500GB disk.

NJRoadfan wrote:

Windows 98SE supports up to 128GiB, the 28bit LBA addressing limit.

This. Checked it recently, settled for a 73 GB WD Raptor. Works without any additional software.

Jorpho wrote:

NJRoadfan wrote:

Windows 98SE supports up to 128GiB, the 28bit LBA addressing limit.

Isn't that just a BIOS limitation?

I often link to http://toastytech.com/guis/miscb2.html, which shows Windows 95 running on a 500GB disk.

It's a limit to the IDE driver (ESDI_506.PDR) IIRC, in addition to IDE controllers. You can show higher capacities, but addressing an IDE HDD past 128 GiB is "unreliable". The slightly lower 127.5 GiB is the limit for some of the disk tools that come with 98SE, capped by a 16 MB max memory allocation.

Even if your BIOS supports 48-bit LBA, Windows 98SE's esdi_506.pdr driver does not. You could run 9x in "Compatibility Mode" (use BIOS Int 13h for disk access) for those cases, but that is annoyingly slow. There were 3rd party drivers that did support 48-bit LBA, Intel's chipset drivers were one of them. Many of the SATA card with 9x drivers should too. Its too bad a port of UniATA hasn't happened yet, it would solve this problem along with the lack of AHCI drivers.

NJRoadfan wrote on 2016-09-23, 14:30:

Even if your BIOS supports 48-bit LBA, Windows 98SE's esdi_506.pdr driver does not. You could run 9x in "Compatibility Mode" (use BIOS Int 13h for disk access) for those cases, but that is annoyingly slow. There were 3rd party drivers that did support 48-bit LBA, Intel's chipset drivers were one of them. Many of the SATA card with 9x drivers should too. Its too bad a port of UniATA hasn't happened yet, it would solve this problem along with the lack of AHCI drivers.

After resurrecting some old intel advanced motherboards and using a 128GB SSD attached to their onboard controller, I noticed some bioses, all AMI bioses, have an option to enable 'PCI IDE BUSMASTER'. After that you can run Win98se in "Compatibility Mode" but still get full DMA drive transfer speeds. It works in realmode dos (big speed increase in ghost cloning), safe mode or fully booting to win98se. It also gives faster speeds than the win9x dma drivers. Lookin in to it, the Bios loads a tiny 1k driver and you can completely bypass any Win9x dma drivers.

I have 98 running on a Seagate 250Gb EIDE disk with a 50/50 partition.
Formatted the disk with GUIFormat in another PC and installed 98 on it from there.
If you do need more storage space than that then a second hard disk is advisable considering the stability of the OS and addressing so many files on the same disk as the OS would only bog it down.
Of course it is perfectly possible to go higher, the limit is 4Tb but good luck getting 98 to address all that space reliably.

As mentioned above one of the capacity limits you will face is on the IDE controller itself. There are SATA PCI add in cards with Win98 support that would side step that problem...
Ive never tried to put a FAT32 format onto a 4Tb disk myself. Im waiting on a new disk controller before I open the disks I do have, once it arrives I can have a go at laying down a FAT32 format on the disks I have but all that would tell you is that my hardware can do it or not. And considering Im using SAS disks on a SAS controller and just laying a FAT32 format on it I dont think it counts for much...

The question of how much 98 can do is valid, but what you should really be asking yourself is how much space do you actually need now and see yourself needing in the future and will a disk of that size reliably work with Win98.

You could add NTFS support to WIn98.
That opens up a whole new arena of ideas.

I always ran into issues when going above 127 GB for Win9x. Sometimes, it appeared to work fine at first, but then random data corruption would occur, or the disk would freeze while in the middle of copying files. For me, the safest bet was to remain below that limit.

That said, if you need more storage space under Win9x, there's a very simple solution. Get a network card and connect your retro rig to an (offline) NAS. Alternatively, you can simply use a WinXP machine with a network share and access that from your Win9x system. I found this to be much more convenient then fiddling with Win9x storage limitations.

Always 127GB or less on each hard drive or SSD, for windows 98SE, due to it's own poorly written programming that looped back and corrupt if attempted to write anything to larger than 127GB. NOT any partitions even 127GB on the larger than 127GB drive, eg 400GB!

Cheers,

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-08-30, 15:27:

I always ran into issues when going above 127 GB for Win9x. Sometimes, it appeared to work fine at first, but then random data corruption would occur, or the disk would freeze while in the middle of copying files. For me, the safest bet was to remain below that limit.

That said, if you need more storage space under Win9x, there's a very simple solution. Get a network card and connect your retro rig to an (offline) NAS. Alternatively, you can simply use a WinXP machine with a network share and access that from your Win9x system. I found this to be much more convenient then fiddling with Win9x storage limitations.

I image you used the updated ESDI_506.PDR from the ATADRV98.EXE package (by LittyX/Lixaanli).
Since 2018 i've been running 98se pretty extensively on a single 1tb partitioned drive with above driver. I've haven't had any corruption yet (compared hashes from backups over the years). One thing I have learnt is to not use scandisk, even the newer one from winme. Once every 4-5 months I just plug the driver into a win10 machine via a usb adapter and run chkdsk.

Note, since this thread was started the rloew AHCI SATA drivers and his 48bit LBA patch have become freely available. You should be able to use larger drives under Windows 9x now without a problem.

Using Paragon NTFS I was able to open and read stuff off my 2TB external disk drives (single 2TB partition), but it takes forever to access the drive - over one minute - and as soon as I connected the HDD the computer slowed to a crawl until it was able to index the partition. Browsing files/folders is also quite slow, but it works, and I was able to copy data to and from the drive.

I also experimented with 500 and 1TB drives. 500GB NTFS partitions load up fairly quickly. 1TB partitions are usable as well, as they don't take nearly as long to access as 2TB ones do, but suffer from the same slow navigation / browsing issue as 2tb partitions - maybe not as pronounced.

I'd say, with NTFS support, you can comfortably use 500GB partitions in win98se, even 1tb ones if you're the patient type.

Under stock win98se the only limitation is partition size, witch is 32gb using FAT32. Installing software that allows Win98 to access NTFS partitions removes that limitation, but partitions over 500 or so GB are slow to read (index?) and difficult to work with. For IDE only systems you also need to take BIOS limitations into account. For PCs with SATA there's compatibility issues to consider - like the fact that most SATA1 motherboards have problems detecting SATA3 devices (or was it SATA2? Someone will correct me for sure) and in some cases Win98 requires SATA drivers to be able to install windows in the first place.

It should be possible to use a single 500gb partition if you split it into 15/16 32(ish) GB partitions, but I personally see that as a pain in the butt.

My advice, if you really want to use a retro rig to store lots of files, install Linux or at least windows 2000 just to make your life a bit easier.

P.S. - I've also had problems with network transfer speeds over win9x networking. It seems to be limited to about 1.5-2MB / second (gross estimate), regardless of what LAN card I used. This limitation seems to apply to USB devices as well, as I've never been able to benefit from USB 2.0 speeds, despite installing USB 2.0 drivers.

Socket3 wrote on 2023-09-01, 16:32:

P.S. - I've also had problems with network transfer speeds over win9x networking. It seems to be limited to about 1.5-2MB / second (gross estimate), regardless of what LAN card I used. This limitation seems to apply to USB devices as well, as I've never been able to benefit from USB 2.0 speeds, despite installing USB 2.0 drivers.

Is your HDD in PIO mode by any chance, instead of using UDMA?

For me, network and USB 2.0 transfer speeds have always been very fast under Win9x, on reasonably capable CPUs. By that, I mean Pentium 3 class or better.