2 things. How big the HDD the motherboard will support is based on chipset and controller. For example some old chipset like 440bx cannot see HDD above 120GB but some new chipset or controller card like a promise controller card or a scsi controller card is no limited to that.

98se out of the box cannot see above 120, but 98se has patches to see above 120 but you have to patch the OS however patching the OS wont matter if you have some old chipset like 440bx cuz thats hardware limited unless you are running off a PCI controller card that can support big hdd. It is a very similar statement to something like windows XP does not support bluray but later on microsoft delivered a patch so it would. Out of the box no, patch yes? easy.

Personally Id use the 120GB SSD. That should work with no problem and will be big performance increase over a HDD. Just make sure that you align the patrician and format it with Gparted, then once you have it installed disable scandisk and never run that or run defrag

With aligned partitions you will also have to run 98set with the arguments setup.exe /is to skip scandisk on install. Otherwise it will complain to you that theres something wrong with the partitian because it doesn't know what a properly aligned SSD is.

It's not confusing good you asked the question tho, lot of bad info on the internet that is either just old and outdated or nonsense.

Just to make things as easy and as plug and play as possible.
- I install a fresh Windows 98 SE to a 80 GB Samsung HDD as a Master.
- and use a 120 GB Samsung HDD as Slave.

I'm not good at complicated installs and patches just trying to install a basic Win98 SE when I haven't used it for like 18 years.

Or can I just partition\divide the 250 GB Maxtor into C:\125 and D:\125 GB ?

you should run your HDDs on separate IDE controller channels if possible. Master on IDE 1 with no slave. And master on IDE 2 no slave. But if you want to use a CD drive you should yes put them as master and slave on primary and hook the CDrom up on its own channel. Since CD roms use ATAPI it will mess with your disk transfer speeds.

I think that for 98se that 200gigs of storage is personnally over kill. I can only see this making sense if you want to store 100s of ISO images and just mount them with elby virtual clone drive instead of having to use CDs. Which i a good way to go just know if a game supports CD audio it wont do that.

Anyways you can get the patches here. Id think these 3 files would be a bare minimum of patching to support bigg HDDs.

http://www.mdgx.com/web.htm#98SE

Unofficial Windows 98 SE 48-bit LBA (Logical Block Addressing) > 137 GB ATA(PI)/(E)IDE/(U)DMA Improved Hard Disk Driver ESDI_506.PDR 4.10.2230:
ATADRV98.EXE [125 KB, English].

http://www.mdgx.com/files/ATADRV98.EXE

Unofficial Windows 98/98 SP1/98 SE Display Errors FORMAT.COM + FDISK.EXE Fix:
Direct download [110 KB, English].
http://www.mdgx.com/files/FDSKFRMT.EXE

Windows 98SE IO.SYS and LBA partitions
http://home.exetel.com.au/phelum/w98.htm

SSD /end thread

cyclone3d wrote:

SSD /end thread

A 120gb SSD will cost you 20$, an IDE to SATA converter will cost you another 20$ at the most. For performance, responsiveness, and reliability IMO it just makes the most sense. I always use my kingston 120gb SSD driver for any windows 98 build.

cyclone3d wrote:

SSD /end thread

Exactly. Just make the primary boot partition (C: drive) smaller than 20GB.

mothergoose729 wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

SSD /end thread

A 120gb SSD will cost you 20$, an IDE to SATA converter will cost you another 20$ at the most. For performance, responsiveness, and reliability IMO it just makes the most sense. I always use my kingston 120gb SSD driver for any windows 98 build.

Newer SATA mech drives are fast enough to max out an IDE interface as well. I think you're fine going with either one, whichever is cheaper or on hand.

gdjacobs wrote:

mothergoose729 wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

SSD /end thread

A 120gb SSD will cost you 20$, an IDE to SATA converter will cost you another 20$ at the most. For performance, responsiveness, and reliability IMO it just makes the most sense. I always use my kingston 120gb SSD driver for any windows 98 build.

Newer SATA mech drives are fast enough to max out an IDE interface as well. I think you're fine going with either one, whichever is cheaper or on hand.

Nothing wrong with a mechanical driver, but all the ones that natively support an IDE interface are more than 10 years old at this point.

mothergoose729 wrote:

Nothing wrong with a mechanical driver, but all the ones that natively support an IDE interface are more than 10 years old at this point.

Agreed, so just use the adapter mentioned a few posts back.

"Just make sure that you align the patrician and format it with Gparted, then once you have it installed disable scandisk and never run that or run defrag With aligned partitions you will also have to run 98set with the arguments setup.exe /is to skip scandisk on install."

A bit hard to understand is there a 1,2,3,... super easy and quick checklist on how to use a SSD on a fresh Win98SE install ?
For complete amateurs so I won't have a massive headache by the end of the day.

- I have already the "SATA to IDE adapter" and "Intel 540s 120gb SSD".

120gb or 80gb drive will work fine, be the easiest and quickest to setup.

SSD can also work, but you should try to align the partition (but then, windows 98 isn't really all that heavy on disk writes, so even bad alignment isn't that big a deal)

user33331 wrote:

"Just make sure that you align the patrician and format it with Gparted, then once you have it installed disable scandisk and ne […]
Show full quote

"Just make sure that you align the patrician and format it with Gparted, then once you have it installed disable scandisk and never run that or run defrag With aligned partitions you will also have to run 98set with the arguments setup.exe /is to skip scandisk on install."

A bit hard to understand is there a 1,2,3,... super easy and quick checklist on how to use a SSD on a fresh Win98SE install ?
For complete amateurs so I won't have a massive headache by the end of the day.

- I have already the "SATA to IDE adapter" and "Intel 540s 120gb SSD".

yes, I would do it this way and follow these instructions. Dont run scandisk on the driver ever though. 98se should be set up with the Setup.exe /IS command /is also works with 98lite. Obviouly you don't use full format to format a SSD either if later on you want to reformat without changing the partition table use FREEDOS format with the /Q for quick. Dont run defrag. You can install tweak UI and disable scandisk aswell.
http://wp.xin.at/archives/1449

This is the proper way to do things if you care about that.

I had trouble initially when I set the sector size to 4096 bytes. 98 would not install itself on the partition I made. What I did was install windows 98 using fdisk and the installation CD, and then I took the hard drive out and put it in my modern windows machine, and used mini partition tool to realign the partition in-place without deleting the data. I popped it back into my 98 machine and it booted up no problem. Compared to no alignment, I doubled my write speeds.

https://www.partitionwizard.com/help/align-partition.html

hmm! i didnt even think about partition alignment when installing on my SSD!

I guess i should repartition the drive and reinstall '98 as its currently just a clean install with nothing on it.

Why does scandisk matter?

98 setup automatically invokes scandisk during install, and when it does it doesn't know what to make of a aligned SSD partitian and will refuse to install windows at least in my testing. using the /is setup switch will bypass scandisk on setup allowing you to skip that. scandisk might be ok to run but in my case it always tells me I have errors and trys to fix them instead of just reporting them to me, and in my case I don't want it to fix my ssd since I know that it thinks its bad and i know its not.

Aragorn wrote:

hmm! i didnt even think about partition alignment when installing on my SSD!

I guess i should repartition the drive and reinstall '98 as its currently just a clean install with nothing on it.

Why does scandisk matter?

You don't have to do that, you can align the partition without reformatting and it should boot right up the same, just with more performance 😀.

Warlord wrote:

98 setup automatically invokes scandisk during install, and when it does it doesn't know what to make of a aligned SSD partitian and will refuse to install windows at least in my testing. using the /is setup switch will bypass scandisk on setup allowing you to skip that. scandisk might be ok to run but in my case it always tells me I have errors and trys to fix them instead of just reporting them to me, and in my case I don't want it to fix my ssd since I know that it thinks its bad and i know its not.

Good tip!