Older SATA cards may work. They often are SATA 1 cards with IDE controllers onboard. Look for something with booting support, not just for your BIOS, but also with a driver for Windows 98.

IDE drives were NEVER the fast ones, and it's somewhat still the case today. SCSI has always ruled the roost in high end performance drives. IDE is limited to 133 mbps at the fastest, with a drive that can even support that, while an Ultra320 SCSI controller from around the same time can go up to 320mbps. There are also things like 10 and 15k RPM drives that will improve speed dramatically. SCSI does happen to be considerably expensive, even today, but it's mostly in terms of controllers. If you can find an Ultra 320 PCI controller that supports booting and has a Windows 98 pre-install driver, you may be able to find SCA-80 drives for next to nothing. They are fast, reliable, and will probably last 50 years from new. While this is all well and good, even the cables are expensive as it's all server gear that's not being ripped out of anything anymore.

IDE to SATA adapters are things I have not tried, but it really depends on the throughput of the adapter. It will still be limited to that 133mbps (around 16 megabytes per second) speed, even with a good drive.

SSD Trim is an automatic function in most cases, afaik. It's supported by various operating systems, and not by others, but if you're talking a modern SATA SSD, the speed decrease you would get from no trim function would still be faster than anything on even a 15k Ultra 320 drive.

There are also SD and CF adapters, but I personally dislike them. It just feels weird to have a format that's intended to be completely mobile rooted to a machine. It just takes some of the oldschool magic out of the machine.

My suggestion is to get an IDE drive. They are slow, but that's part of the fine computing experience. The anticipation of waiting for games to load just tells you what that period was like. SATA is more for stuff like XP, but even to that matter, most Socket A chips are really a bit past Windows 98, and more in the Windows ME territory, which would probably have better SATA support. Even Slot A would do well with 1999 ME. Don't be scared by the whole "Windows Crash Edition" thing with ME. It's a usable OS.

If you are looking for the fastest thing on planet fast, get a board with PCI-X, 64-bit PCI, or 66+mhz PCI. These are faster versions of PCI, normally available on workstation and server gear, but drive controllers can normally take advantage of that. You can also try a RAID array, with something like a 4 drive RAID 1/0 combo. That will definitely be faster. SATA is going to probably have driver issues, because it came out in 2003, well after XP hit the scene. SCSI is fast, but expensive, and the IDE/SATA converters may be a mixed bag.

As far as SATA controllers go, A PCI controller that uses a VIA 6421 chipset should be the way to go since Nathan Lineback has some good information and drivers available for this specific chipset, then again, his info mainly assumes Windows 9x is already installed on another IDE drive so IDK how useful this would be to you.

Bobolaf wrote:

1) IDE HDDs: the few I have are painfully slow are there any quicker ones to look out for?

Have you checked to see if any of your drives have bad sectors? I know most hard drives I've seen slow down because of developing bad sectors so it's worth a shot, from my experience a good IDE hard drive made within the last decade should be fairly fast on 9x and other old systems (but nowhere near as fast as a newer SATA system).

I personally use Seagate drives on desktops with IDE, a 20-120GB drive should be plenty for an Athlon XP system.

Phil did a video on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edmg43t28jg

Personally, I like using whatever the motherboard supports, Makes the system feel more "correct?" ..struggling to think of the right word.

IDE systems I have range from 486-P3, for which I have stockpile from drives I've pulled from old PC's. Most of these are late model IDE drives so bottleneck will most likely be the system itself more then the drive.
If I ever do run out of IDE drives, I'll probably go down the SATA to IDE adaptor as adaptors and keep using the onboard controller.

I do have 2 computers with SCISI on-board and do use SCSI disks, but I really wouldn't recommend this unless your trying to keep things period correct or really want to mess around with it. Most HDD's will be from old servers so will have clocked up quite a lot of hours usage compared to IDE or SATA drives

My main concern with SCSI, is hard drives will have come from old servers so will have clocked up quite a lot of hours of use by now

Ampera wrote:

IDE to SATA adapters are things I have not tried, but it really depends on the throughput of the adapter. It will still be limited to that 133mbps (around 16 megabytes per second) speed, even with a good drive.

You are a touch off on this one 😀

The number in a UDMA mode refers to Megabytes per second. an ATA133 is good for a theoretical 133 Megabytes per second, which is the saturation point for a standard 32bit 33mhz PCI bus (32 bits * 33million / 8 = ~133)

sata1 increased this to 150MB/s but it only really made a difference if the sata controller was on a pcie bus or else it just ran up against the same pci bus limit

Bobolaf wrote:

After many years of toying with the idea I am going ahead and building a retro k7 based gaming PC. I know what is required CPU, […]
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After many years of toying with the idea I am going ahead and building a retro k7 based gaming PC. I know what is required CPU, CPU and RAM wise to play the games happily I am after but I would like to have quick ish HDD so the system does not feel to sluggish so have a few questions regarding HDDs.

1) IDE HDDs: the few I have are painfully slow are there any quicker ones to look out for?

2) IDE to SATA HDD adapters: What is the performance like on these and can anyone recommend some for me?

3) Sata cards: are there any cards that are play nicely with Win98SE?

4) SSD Trim: am i correct in thinking no SSD manufactures offer Win98SE Trim tools and there are no home brew tools to do this?

5) SCSI cards: Are there any fast SCSI cards that are easy to work with on Win98SE?

Thanks

1) K7 ranges from Slot A to Barton. Back in the days I mated my Barton build with either a promise or a highpoint PCI raid card with two IDE drives in RAID 0 setup. It was adequately fast but I was running XP, though. Later years I compared a bunch of IDE raids cards on Linux and the 3ware Escalade series is faster than LSI, Adaptec, Promise or Highpoint. Not sure about Win98 compatibility.

2) Not a good idea. I got a few adapters from ebay and they have various limits on the transfer speed, around 50MB/s. I only used them to temporarily copy files from SATA drives to older machines and install OS from SATA optical drives.

5) According to the HCL Win98 supports a lot of SCSI cards natively. I love 15K SCSI drives. Although not as fast as SSDs they are noticeably faster than 7200rpm IDE drives in daily use. I eventually replaced the RAID 0 setup in my Barton build with 2940U2W + 15K SCSI drives. The advantage in faster seeking overwhelms the 80MB/s transfer speed cap of the 2940U2W card. Before transitioning to SSD my last workhorse build used LSI Megaraid 320-2X + MBA3073 in RAID 0 setup. The LSI card is faster than Dell Perc4 and HP Smartarray P600 according to my benchmarks. A few tips:
5.1) Early 15K SCSI drives are horrendously noisy. Later ones are satisfyingly melodious.
5.2) Although SCSI drives are built to last but beware that many used drives have already been suffered from long time heavy use. Scan the drives with tools like MHDD to assess the remaining life before putting to serious use.

Super_Relay wrote:

You are a touch off on this one :) […]
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Ampera wrote:

IDE to SATA adapters are things I have not tried, but it really depends on the throughput of the adapter. It will still be limited to that 133mbps (around 16 megabytes per second) speed, even with a good drive.

You are a touch off on this one 😀

The number in a UDMA mode refers to Megabytes per second. an ATA133 is good for a theoretical 133 Megabytes per second, which is the saturation point for a standard 32bit 33mhz PCI bus (32 bits * 33million / 8 = ~133)

sata1 increased this to 150MB/s but it only really made a difference if the sata controller was on a pcie bus or else it just ran up against the same pci bus limit

At least I stated indirectly that my assumptions were mostly conjecture.

Also K7s have 0 PCIE lanes, and most boards don't support PCI-X, or higher clock speed/bit width PCI. So while I'm not correct in all situations, for all practical intents and purposes, the throughput is limited to 133 Mbps.

133 MBps. Certainly 60-90 MB/s is achieved in use through ATA/100.

In burst mode you can get up to the theoretical limit of the controller with a somewhat modern IDE or SATA fast drive. Did some ATTO and HDtach benchmarks on a HP DC7700 with an ICH8 chipset and a WD1600JB 7200rpm SATA2 drive today. Were suprised that that there were almost no difference in having the controller in IDE or RAID(AHCI) mode. Max transfer speed were 60-65MBps and burst speed just above 190MBps. Strange that burst speed in IDE mode got above 133MBps? Maybe the cache plays a role here.

Wow thank you for all the great advice. I am tempted to give the SCSI route a go. I am struggling to find and U320 adapters with Windows 98 support. I did find two U160 adapters very cheap a Adaptec 29160N and Adaptec 2100S that I got for £1 and £2.99 respectively. I also got two manufacturer refurbished 146gb 10k drives for £11. The motherboard I have only has 33mhz 32bit bus so I will be limited to 133mbs but I am hoping the response and average throughput will be a lot quicker. Failing this I may shop amount for a new motherboard with built in SATA or possibly 66Mhz PCI bus.

be careful with drives over 120GB. Windows 98 does not have 48bit LBA as standard. There are third party patches for it IIRC, but I don't know how well they work.