The only problem with using a ssd is win98 writes to the drive a lot and will trash your driver over time, but if your going to go with ssd get the cheapest you can find or you could go with sd cards those are cheap. Normally what I do is I bought a ton of white label 120GB ide HDD for around $12 brand new on ebay.

You have any link for these 120gb drives Oldskoolmaniac ?

I prefer older used higher-end SSDs with 25/34nm MLC chips (I myself have bunch of Intel X25-M and 320 models) and PATA adapter. Sometimes it is possible to find a pack of them for good price per unit. Another advantage is that when you want to put them in some really old gear that takes only 8GB or 30GB drives, you can enable Overprovision in them and make them look like theyre small. Wearing them off is really not an issue as these usually withstand hundreds of TBs of write.

Then theres a way of CF/IDE and SD/IDE adapters and memory cards. SD cards nowadays seem to give much better results in 4k random write than most CF cards, but adapters are more expensive.

If you you will go the SSD, effect in speedup will definitely be visible. With CF or SD, it depends mostly on cards performance.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

The only problem with using a ssd is win98 writes to the drive a lot and will trash your driver over time [..]

MS says that pagefiles are actually just fine for SSDs. 😉

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?


Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

[..]

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/e7/2009/05/0 … d-state-drives/

I would have loved to put a PATA SSD (KingSpec, anyone?) in my Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2. What stops me is that XP lacks TRIM support and I don't know of any KingSpec software like Samsung's Magician or Crucial's Storage Executive that would intentionally run a TRIM operation similar to how Intel does theirs. The laptop doesn't have any space available to install a PATA-SATA adapter for the drive, so only a native PATA SSD like the KingSpec one would work. I COULD try installing Windows 7, but then you have to get a license key and Microsoft is pretty much not selling any more of those....then I'd have to fight the drivers to install (since the only graphics driver I know that works on it comes directly from Dell and is for WinXP), etc. Would love to stay XP with an SSD for the power and speed benefits, but if the SSD is just going to bog down without TRIM support, what's the point?

keropi wrote:

You have any link for these 120gb drives Oldskoolmaniac ?

Yes I do here you go http://www.ebay.com/itm/120GB-2MB-Cache-7200R … 4oAAMXQHO9ReeUc and also here http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-120GB-7200RPM-2MB … bQAAOxysftRjAvj I have 6 of these drives and never had a problem except for the jumpers settings that are labeled are not correct, when you recieve these drives the jumper thats in is for cable select and when you pull the jumper its set as a slave.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

keropi wrote:

You have any link for these 120gb drives Oldskoolmaniac ?

Yes I do here you go http://www.ebay.com/itm/120GB-2MB-Cache-7200R … 4oAAMXQHO9ReeUc and also here http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-120GB-7200RPM-2MB … bQAAOxysftRjAvj I have 6 of these drives and never had a problem except for the jumpers settings that are labeled are not correct, when you recieve these drives the jumper thats in is for cable select and when you pull the jumper its not set as a slave.

Seriously considering buying about 100 of those 🤣

I'm pretty inexperienced in hard drives and the such, and it's my understanding Windows 98 won't "see" drives bigger than 32 GB/won't boot off of them. Would I have to partition one into 32 GB sections, or do something else?

thanks for that link by the way 🤣

windows will work on drives on drives up too I believe 139GB, but since only 120GB drives only exist then that your highest. Dont use fdisk just format the hard drive in another computer using guiformat program.

cj_reha wrote:

I'm pretty inexperienced in hard drives and the such, and it's my understanding Windows 98 won't "see" drives bigger than 32 GB/won't boot off of them. Would I have to partition one into 32 GB sections, or do something else?

I used two 40GB Western Digital HDDs for my Windows 98 build and Windows 98 (FIRST Edition) formatted them both FAT32 with a single 40GB partition each. I never saw a problem. So you must be thinking about a motherboard limitation from way back.

Some Windows 98 command line tools, like FDISK and FORMAT, start breaking with drives larger than 64 GiB. They will work with larger drives, but the numbers won't make much sense. 128 GiB is the "real" limit of stock / unmodified Windows.

Personally I tend to use drives under 64 GiB. Modern drives can simply be capacity limited. So you can turn a fast Seagate 2 TB drive, into a 32 GiB drive for example. I don't think this is possible with SSD drives, but you never know. Soon you won't be able to buy such small SSD drives however, so that's a concern.

I did some Windows 98 benchmarks and found that on your typical Pentium III, the CPU is holding everything back, no matter how fast your storage is. Windows 98 on an Athlon FX however, now that's a different story 😁

I can't test easily as my DOS machine is BIOS limited (and 8 hours away from me at Uni). Have you tried the FreeDOS versions of FORMAT and FDISK to see if they're viable substitutions under MS-DOS 7.1+?

would it be possible to replace windows 98 format.com and fdisk.exe that's on the CD itself with the FreeDOS versions?

cj_reha wrote:

I'm pretty inexperienced in hard drives and the such, and it's my understanding Windows 98 won't "see" drives bigger than 32 GB/won't boot off of them.

Windows XP and later will not create FAT32 partitions larger than 32 GB, but this limitation is not inherent to the filesystem; it's just that FAT32 is "inefficient" on large partitions compared to NTFS.

gdjacobs wrote:

I can't test easily as my DOS machine is BIOS limited (and 8 hours away from me at Uni). Have you tried the FreeDOS versions of FORMAT and FDISK to see if they're viable substitutions under MS-DOS 7.1+?

Microsoft actually released a fix for the Win98 verison of fdisk, so there's no need to resort to the FreeDOS versions.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/263044
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/327202
A further fixed version turned up at http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/85573-correct … isk-and-format/ .

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

would it be possible to replace windows 98 format.com and fdisk.exe that's on the CD itself with the FreeDOS versions?

Why wouldn't it be?