if by accurately you mean long seek and loading times, then no it won't be very accurate ^^

upgrading to a SSD is totally worth it imo if you don't want to stay 100% original.

The best quality of life upgrade you can make for sure.

imi wrote on 2021-02-03, 03:42:

if by accurately you mean long seek and loading times, then no it won't be very accurate ^^

upgrading to a SSD is totally worth it imo if you don't want to stay 100% original.

As long as the game doesn’t run crazy fast then i don’t mind. But i am getting sick of booting from harddrives with these old builds.

I use SATA SSDs with a Pentium 4 system via a SATA-to-IDE adapter. The fact that the drive is an SSD is completely transparent to the software. As long as your system interfaces with the adapter properly (newer systems should), then the fact that it's connected to a SSD is not a problem. I use DOS, OS/2, Windows 3.x, and Windows NT with these drives.

I have a 486 that doesn't recognize the adapter, so older systems may have issues with this setup. You may need to use a CF-to-IDE adapter in that case for better compatibility.

If you do not care about keeping the hardware 100% period-correct, then it is worth upgrading to an SSD. They are faster, silent, more energy efficient and more reliable than a 10-15 year old HDD. Your experience may change slightly, though since your OS will boot faster and apps will likely also start faster. For replacing an IDE HDD, I'd go the CF card route. For a SATA one, a SATA SSD.

I ran into problems with IDE Adaptors mainly due to the poor quality solder used in some of the adaptors. I reflowed the solder and they work perfectly with my Original Xbox. Guess it’s time for an upgrade for my Dual Pentium 3 build. It already has a modern 80plus Bronze PSU and just needs a Floppy USB ODE and SSD’s along with a recap.

aha2940 wrote on 2021-02-03, 03:51:

If you do not care about keeping the hardware 100% period-correct, then it is worth upgrading to an SSD. They are faster, silent, more energy efficient and more reliable than a 10-15 year old HDD. Your experience may change slightly, though since your OS will boot faster and apps will likely also start faster. For replacing an IDE HDD, I'd go the CF card route. For a SATA one, a SATA SSD.

I love modern upgrades as i built my rig to use it. Besides the beige case, most of the components are definately not period correct. Dual Pentium 3 1,4ghz Tualatins, 1gb of ram, Geforce 4Ti 4600, Awe64, Matrox Millennium 2, Audigy 2, Modern 80plus Bronze 400watt psu, 98SE, XP SP3 32Bit. I would love to replace the Floppy with USB Floppy and HDD’s with SSD’s. As long as the games continue to be playable but with faster loading times and better reliability, then i don’t mind. Puts less strain on the psu i guess, due to the power efficient and solid state nature of SSD’s.

If you want a museumpiece, get the spinning rust. If you are actually going to do things on the computer, really the only question is if you want to go with a high performance device like a sata ssd or a removable device like a CF or SD.

If your computer is faster enough to run windows 7, sata SSD is the way to go. You’ll have a fast enough system that you’ll see the difference in real world tasks, you’ll have trim support, and you’ll be able to talk directly to the internet with modern browsers.

But with Win 98 boxes, the hardware isn’t fast enough to realize the full performance differnce between a removable and a Sata ssd, and the luxury of taking the removable storage over to a faster computer for downloading & unzipping is hard to give up.

Windows XP builds get a little more murky. No trim support and higher day to day disk churn make things a bit less clear, but you’ll probably want the SSD just to make things more responsive.

douglar wrote on 2021-02-03, 04:05:

If you want a museumpiece, get the spinning rust. If you are actually going to do things on the computer, really the only quest […]
Show full quote

If you want a museumpiece, get the spinning rust. If you are actually going to do things on the computer, really the only question is if you want to go with a high lerformance device like a sata ssd or a removable device like a CF or SD.

If your computer is faster enough to run windows 7, sata SSD is the way to go. You’ll have a fast enough system that you’ll see the difference in real world tasks, you’ll have trim support, and you’ll be able to talk directly to the internet with modern browsers.

But with Win 98 boxes, the hardware isn’t fast enough to realize the full performance differnce between a removable and a Sata ssd, and the luxury of taking the removable storage over to a faster computer for downloading & unzipping is hard to give up.

Windows XP builds get a little more murky. No trim support and higher day to day disk churn make things a bit less clear, but you’ll probably want the SSD just to make things more responsive.

Thanks for the info but technically all builds can benefit from Sold State Tech as long as the software works/hardware with it. Dos, 95, 98 builds CF/SD Cards. And 98SE, XP, 7 SSD’s .

I recommend a SATA SSD and either a Marvell or Jmicron based IDE to SATA adapter or a Promise SATA (check for Windows 98 compatibility) or IDE (most are Windows 9x compatible) controller and a Marvell or Jmicron based IDE to SATA adapter (if using an IDE Promise controller). You could also use a SIL3114 based PCI SATA controller .

If you want TRIM support under DOS, the SIL3114 will not work . See Re: Small capacity SSD PATA/SATA benchmarks (Marvell and Jmicron based IDE to SATA converters do pass TRIM commands, as long as the controller does, which the Promise Ultra133 TX2 and ICH2 do ).

If your motherboard has an ICH4 IDE controller, you are better off considering a Marvell based IDE to SATA adapter . See mSATA to IDE Trouble

Finally, the utility I use to TRIM under DOS (Windows 98 SE DOS 7.1) is rloew's TRIM utility . http://lonecrusader.x10host.com/rloew/trim.html

EDIT: If you want to use TRIM under DOS, be careful about what you use to partition your SSD (avoid FreeDOS Fdisk). See Corruption issue when using rloew's TRIM.EXE (TRIM utility for DOS) with FreeDOS FDISK 1.2.1/1.3.1 partitioned DISK

I've a stockpile of spinning rust so wont be upgrading anytime soon but if I had to go out and buy storage I'd probably go SSD for Win98 and above.
Dos era I'm already using CF cards, in part because I never need anything larger then 8GB.

I did miss the sound of the HDD spinning up on dos era machines so usually install the OS on a traditional HDD and have everything else on the CF card .

Only other drawback is some games had cool loading screens you'll miss out on now.

chinny22 wrote on 2021-02-03, 09:50:

I've a stockpile of spinning rust so wont be upgrading anytime soon but if I had to go out and buy storage I'd probably go SSD f […]
Show full quote

I've a stockpile of spinning rust so wont be upgrading anytime soon but if I had to go out and buy storage I'd probably go SSD for Win98 and above.
Dos era I'm already using CF cards, in part because I never need anything larger then 8GB.

I did miss the sound of the HDD spinning up on dos era machines so usually install the OS on a traditional HDD and have everything else on the CF card .

Only other drawback is some games had cool loading screens you'll miss out on now.

yes, i've got some old hard drives in a 'a few gb' range as spares, they still still work but to be honest when the ones in old PCs start giving up i'll likely go with ide to sd or cf, or even modest capacity cheaper ssd's, seems entirely sensible to me

infact a SBC with everything completely new but acting like a year 2000 pc and able to fool OSes of the time into thinking there were spinning disks and agp cards etc would be cool, the experience of running an old PC beats the hardware authenticity factor, nice though the latter can be

i can imagine there are some games that make assumptions about disk access that will somehow be tripped up if hdd access is too fast though, there's always some exception

chinny22 wrote on 2021-02-03, 09:50:

I've a stockpile of spinning rust so wont be upgrading anytime soon but if I had to go out and buy storage I'd probably go SSD f […]
Show full quote

I've a stockpile of spinning rust so wont be upgrading anytime soon but if I had to go out and buy storage I'd probably go SSD for Win98 and above.
Dos era I'm already using CF cards, in part because I never need anything larger then 8GB.

I did miss the sound of the HDD spinning up on dos era machines so usually install the OS on a traditional HDD and have everything else on the CF card .

Only other drawback is some games had cool loading screens you'll miss out on now.

You could write a TSR program, intercept 21h and introduce a delay on all disk actions, then place the file in the autoexec.bat.

Also will be installing a bay mount for the SSD’s.

Depending on the size of the SSD and how often you overwrite data on it, you may not need to TRIM it that often (if at all). You could take it out of the case from time to time and connect it to a Win7 or Win10 computer to perform a TRIM operation.

fosterwj03 wrote on 2021-02-03, 14:48:

Depending on the size of the SSD and how often you overwrite data on it, you may not need to TRIM it that often (if at all). You could take it out of the case from time to time and connect it to a Win7 or Win10 computer to perform a TRIM operation.

Windows 7 and 10 do not allow TRIMMING of a FAT32 filesystems. See Re: Planning to install SSD in my Windows 98 machine. Help, advice, suggestions, etc.?

If this has changed and/or you have information/evidence to the contrary, please share .

EDIT: A potential workaround would be to backup the FAT32 filesystem, plug into a modern system, format as NTFS, manually TRIM, plug back into retro system and restore the backup . This would would take additional time and effort and waste write endurance .

EDIT2: It has been argued before on vogons that the performance effects of not running TRIM might not actually be noticeable on an SSD that would be bottlenecked by something like UDMA133 or slower anyway . I don't know if this is an educated guess, an uneducated guess or if this has been explicitly tested by someone .

EDIT3 : corrected obvious typo

I wasn't aware that Windows wouldn't TRIM a FAT32 disk. I only use NTFS on the SSDs I use with Win10. I'll keep that in mind.

TRIM pre-erases unused but "populated" data areas in the SSD so that a later write to that area doesn't need to perform an erase operation first (thus saving future time). If you don't delete data that often or overwrite data (which on many SSDs just writes the new data to another part of the drive and leaves the old data in place for later erasure), then you wouldn't need to TRIM hardly at all. The drive's internal "Garbage Collection" may implement the pre-erasure without the TRIM command, but it would happen less often.

You also don't need to TRIM if you don't mind the extra time it takes to flash the cells to overwrite data. Edit2 of the previous post notes that the interface may act slowly enough to mask the effect.

If you hammer the drive with lots of data overwrites in a short time or fill the drive with lots of data and later overwrite much of it, then TRIM can help a bunch. TRIM doesn't help as much if the drive is already nearly full with active data, though.

On my "hi-po" WIn98Se box, I went with a NOS 2.5" laptop hard drive (non SSD) and IDE to SATA adapter. Those laptop drives that were released just before SSD's became popular ran cool, fast and quiet and had a decent amount of cache on them. Even on my XP gaming rig I have a 500gb 7200 RPM laptop drive in it and it runs like a champ.

I did not want to worry about the trim stuff with SSD's. I can wait a second or two more for the game to load for the piece of mind a spinner gives me.

On my DOS/Win95 box, I'm using a CF card/IDE adapter. I just really need to be able to take it out to load programs on and such.

One option for FAT32 TRIM is Linux, kernel 4.19, and newer, can do it.