The Promise S150 sounds like an attractive option.
What I like to do is have an SSD be my boot drive, while an old mechanical handles swap and spooling duties. That way I don't put that much stress on my SSD.

I have both setups - and a third: SATA SSD connected to the onboard PATA via a PATA to SATA adapter.

The Promise SATA-TX2Plus is undoubtedly the fastest in use, but initializing the controller significantly increases boot time. Also, the biggest advantage of SSD vs HDD is low seek times so fast random reads. You get that regardless of the interface. For that reason I tend towards preferring SATA SSD via PATA-SATA adapter over a dedicated PCI controller, unless integrated PATA is really crap/buggy (i.e. on Serverworks chipsets) or you don't care about boot time at all.

thanks for your input! Guess a SATA SSD on a PATA-SATA adapter is the way to go.
Can you recommend any brands/model for such an adapter?
Cheapest adapter on amazon is a DIGITUS DS-33151-1, though in the review section someone mentions he gets freezes when copying large files in a 440BX machine, which is exactly what my board has.

It's hit-and-miss with the beasts so I prefer buying the cheapest I can find on Aliexpress (just a few EUR including shipping) so it's hardly a loss if nothing works. Fortunately I haven't had any trouble with mine, and I ran them both temporarily on a BX board before installing a PCI controller and permanently on a TX board, which is basically the same when it comes to I/O.

Unfortunately away from home for a few days, so can't look up exact specs, but it was a red PCB you stuck into the motherboard PATA connector, with a jumper /switch for the direction it works in.

Painy wrote:

Cheapest adapter on amazon is a DIGITUS DS-33151-1, though in the review section someone mentions he gets freezes when copying large files in a 440BX machine, which is exactly what my board has.

I'm not sure if it is really related to the adapter, because "freezes when copying large (number of) files" is a Windows 98 "feature" IIRC. 🤣 There are patches for that though (i.e. MGDX tips site).

I was recently considering alternatives to replace a dying hard disk on my PIII/win98 PC. Theory is one thing but I thought since I had all the parts available why not also get some numbers.
So although the comparison doesn't include a CF card, since PATA->SATA adapters were brought into the discussion I believe this has a place here with some interesting results.

My intention was to compare a faster-than-period-correct mechanical 80GB IDE HDD against a today's (or better yesterday's) SATAIII 64GB SSD. So I benchmarked using ATTO Disk Benchmark, but also used the system for a week or so to get the real feel (very important!)
-The IDE HDD
-The SSD with a PATA->SATA adapter
-The SSD on the frowned upon Silicon Image Sil311x PCI SATA controller
-The SSD on the praised Promise PCI SATA controller

My bullet points:
-A good IDE hard disk is much better than I thought it would be. See the writes? Just how and why?
-The Silicon Image controller excels in reads but chokes in writes, and apart from the chart this is also perceivable when actually using the system. Feels OK until you throw a lot to it and experience the occasional stutter.
-I promise, the Promise is the way to go if you're after the best. Feels fast and it is fast and consistent.
-Wow those PATA->SATA adapters... Seriously, even if I ended up using the Promise controller for this specific win98 PC, those adapters are gold. Nice performance, no hiccups whatsoever, no drivers needed, they just work more than OK. Yeah transfer rate figures may suggest otherwise, but for real use an SSD with a PATA->SATA adapter is faster and more reliable that anything you ever had/need.

Hope this helps someone...

whats the x axis showing? it looks a bit like You were working with an almost empty drive or did not disable write caches

mrau wrote:

whats the x axis showing? it looks a bit like You were working with an almost empty drive or did not disable write caches

Oh sorry, it's ATTO's benchmark different size chunks. So it's the performance when reading-writing 8K/16K/etc

It looks like the idea of the CF2IDE-adapter is already pretty much out of the question. 😒

I have had a really pleasant experience with CF-cards for my retro systems though; especially with my systems
that are pre-USB. The huge benefit of a CF-card is that it is very easy to transfer files to from your modern PC.
Yes, you can use a USB IDE-hard disk reader, but a CF-card is way more convenient. I haven't yet experienced any issues with them wearing out as well. 😉