For CompactFlash cards, I mostly use the Verbatim branded 4GB cards from Amazon. It looks like the regular version of those cards is no longer available, but they do have the "Premium" (faster) versions. I haven't tried those yet.

They also offer a 16GB capacity as a premium version.

For adapters, traditionally I've started buying the StarTech 3.5" drive bay adapters: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-3-5-Inch- … 7252654-2414708

They include both a drive bay option plus a rear slot bracket, so you can install them in either location.

Unfortunately the regular StarTech slot adapters are also no longer available.

consider sata ssd with ide adapters instead of compact flash. it will likely be faster and considerably cheaper than the premium cf equivalents. even moderately priced brand-name industrial cf cards can underperform 20yr old mechanical hdd models (at least with seq read/writes).

stanwebber wrote on 2024-02-06, 22:02:

consider sata ssd with ide adapters instead of compact flash. it will likely be faster and considerably cheaper than the premium cf equivalents. even moderately priced brand-name industrial cf cards can underperform 20yr old mechanical hdd models (at least with seq read/writes).

^^^ Especially if your retro system is a Pentium 2 or newer. Since the OP was talking about 80GB drives, he's probably in that category.

But as you go back in time to ISA based systems, the performance benefit becomes much less clear and the industrial CFs rarely have LBA compatibility issues.

CF for Dos is no problem. The wear on the card is very low, because there hardly any r/w activity. For Windows 9x you definitely want to use industrial cards, 16 or 32GB that can withstand more intense i/o. Especially when you are going to keep the swap file, that's wearing the CF out faster. The SSD route is also convenient, much more reliable but less easy to swap out.

Could you install both and get the best of both worlds?
Pri master ssd with Windows 9x, pri slave compactflash 512 - 4GB
When booting into dos, just disabled the pri master in bios temporarily. Most s7 boards support booting from pri slave so nu problem there.
Or maybe there a chance the bios supports boot select at post screen, that would make it even easier 😀

https://www.amazon.com/ICY-DOCK-Trayless-flex … B/dp/B01LZJNR91 Something like this by IcyDock paired up with a couple SATA to IDE adapters on the back would make for a similar use to the front CF adapter drive bay thing by StarTech.

EDIT: I watched a video on the dual 2.5" dock and it has two SATA data connectors on the back and one power connector. You would need to wire up the IDE to SATA adapters with cables rather than plugging it directly into the dock.

Yeah I'm okay with using a CF card for the 6.22 install and an ssd for 95 and another ssd for 98.
But where can you source industrial Compact Flash Cards for okay prices?
Also are you sure that the star tech ones are all right , I've read about some people having issues with them?

AppleSauce wrote on 2024-02-07, 14:54:

Yeah I'm okay with using a CF card for the 6.22 install and an ssd for 95 and another ssd for 98.
But where can you source industrial Compact Flash Cards for okay prices?
Also are you sure that the star tech ones are all right , I've read about some people having issues with them?

You can usually get Industrial CF's for $10-$20 on ebay, newegg, or amazon.

https://www.newegg.com/p/0UF-0616-00001?Item=9SIB5K8J230568
https://www.newegg.com/transcend-8gb-compact- … =9SIB888K509937

Another thing you can do to reduce flash wear on a win98 install is to set ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 in the 386Enh section of system.ini. By default, Win98 tries to guess what it can swap out in advance of actually swapping so it is constantly playing with the swapfile in the background so that there's less disk activity when it does need to swap . It's helpful when you have < 24MB and a mechanical drive. It's not nearly as useful when you have >= 24MB and fast storage. So set ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 and the background disk IO goes way down.

AppleSauce wrote on 2024-02-07, 14:54:

Yeah I'm okay with using a CF card for the 6.22 install and an ssd for 95 and another ssd for 98.
But where can you source industrial Compact Flash Cards for okay prices?
Also are you sure that the star tech ones are all right , I've read about some people having issues with them?

I own and use plenty CF adapters from StarTech, both in the 3.5" slot and rear bracket slot variety. They are, simply put, perfect. Absolutely 0 issue with them.
I use them with Transcend "regular" CF cards, 2GB and 4GB, and have sticked to them since then. No issue whatsoever.

I only use CF for DOS, for reasons mentioned before by others. For Win9x it's small SSD land(I stick to 80 and 120GB ones, as I've been lucky to recover an indecent amount of Intel 80GB SSD's from old industrial machines for free), either with PATA-SATA adapters or old Promise SATA cards. For the adapters, I own some from Startech, and other unknown but pretty common chinese ones, and in both cases no real issue to report. Compared to CF they definitely generated more headaches 😀 but most probably because of Win9x settings and/or motherboard chipsets and drivers, DMA etc..

As someone that is absolutely not interested in being 100% period correct and not missing HDD noise at all, this is the no1 QoL improvement I wouldn't skip on.

I recommend Mac compatible SSDs or converters.
Anything an Mac Mini or iMac is fine with must have good compatibility.

Last time, for a Mac Mini G4, I've used a 44pin to m.SATA converter chassis (looks like 2,5" HDD).
The converter board was doing fine with Tiger and OS 9.2.

Such converter enclosures do usually have a little bit higher quality electronics.

And the matching m-SATA SSD is a real SSD, not just an CF or SD card.

An optional 44pin to 40pin mechanical adapter makes it work on normal IDE.
It comes with a Molex power plug.

I was originally using a 32GB Transcend industrial CF card for my portable FreeDOS setup, but I noticed that I was getting strange I/O issues with Terminal Velocity and Vigilance on Talos V where there would be bursts of freezing while waiting for assets to load. This had disappeared when I copied the CF card via dd onto those generic blue-and-white labelled CF cards from eBay. I've also noticed that the generic CF cards can handle faster ISA bus speeds compared to the Transcend card.

As for SSDs, I've used random 120GB DRAMless SSDs without any issue for data drives, Gigabyte SSDs are cheap and good for that purpose. I have a 2TB Corsair MX500 which I use for my main Win98 data drive connected via a Promise SATA150 card, works perfectly after installing rloew's PATCHATA and PATCH1TB. My portable Win98 setup uses an 8GB ADATA SLC SSD, it's small enough to be detected on mobos that only support CHS. I've reinstalled Win98 on that countless times (2GB OS partition, second partition contains a copy of the Win98 CD along with critical drivers) when driver conflicts start affecting overall stability, or whenever I need to downgrade DirectX to determine minimal DX runtime requirements. The only problem with SSDs is that I've never had any luck getting them to work with XTIDE.

I've only used cheap CF->IDE and SATA->IDE adapters, nothing special at all.

But when a SSD is used with an IDE adapter, there is no support for TRIM command. What is the performance of a SSD in these conditions after a while ?

Righto well I'm considering one of those generic CF cards and a StarTech CF card adapter.
And maybe an MSata for the other OS installs.

George Razvan wrote on 2024-02-08, 06:59:

But when a SSD is used with an IDE adapter, there is no support for TRIM command. What is the performance of a SSD in these conditions after a while ?

PATA can support TRIM, but getting there through a SATA bridge with an OS < Windows 7 is going to be really tough, so you are probably safe assuming you are not going to be able to use TRIM in circumstances like this.

Looking at the documentation on this from major SSD vendors, they claim that their storage devices are designed to work reliably with or without TRIM.

My experience is that SSD's on retro computers manage to handle loads <=UDMA6 better than anything else, even after a lot of use. I've had a hard time designing a test that shows any degradation over time. I recently bought a bag of 16GB microsata devices for less than $2 per part. I'm willing to burn a couple of them in testing if there's something you want me to try.

If you are concerned about write amplification and garbage collection, consider purchasing an SSD that is >50% larger than you need and then leave leaving the space that you don't need unpartitioned.

douglar wrote on 2024-02-08, 12:45:

PATA can support TRIM, but getting there through a SATA bridge with an OS < Windows 7 is going to be really tough, so you are p […]
Show full quote

George Razvan wrote on 2024-02-08, 06:59:

But when a SSD is used with an IDE adapter, there is no support for TRIM command. What is the performance of a SSD in these conditions after a while ?

PATA can support TRIM, but getting there through a SATA bridge with an OS < Windows 7 is going to be really tough, so you are probably safe assuming you are not going to be able to use TRIM in circumstances like this.

Looking at the documentation on this from major SSD vendors, they claim that their storage devices are designed to work reliably with or without TRIM.

My experience is that SSD's on retro computers manage to handle loads <=UDMA6 better than anything else, even after a lot of use. I've had a hard time designing a test that shows any degradation over time. I recently bought a bag of 16GB microsata devices for less than $2 per part. I'm willing to burn a couple of them in testing if there's something you want me to try.

If you are concerned about write amplification and garbage collection, consider purchasing an SSD that is >50% larger than you need and then leave leaving the space that you don't need unpartitioned.

Yeah. I have a modern, but quite basic, 512GB SSD running on my Socket A/XP rig with IDE adapter and I have zero worries about the wear. First, current SSDs are quite a bit better without trim than a decade ago and as I have many vintage systems, any particular retro rig doesn’t get that much hours in any case, so I’m quite positive that I don’t need to worry about replacing that any time soon. In fact, it is more likely that some vintage part gives up the ghost before that drive. And as those “small” SSDs are cheap as dirt, it is not a big deal to replace that drive if it happens to fail. It’s not like I have any critical data on these systems. It is just the effort of installing everything again.

douglar wrote on 2024-02-08, 12:45:

PATA can support TRIM, but getting there through a SATA bridge with an OS < Windows 7 is going to be really tough, so you are p […]
Show full quote

George Razvan wrote on 2024-02-08, 06:59:

But when a SSD is used with an IDE adapter, there is no support for TRIM command. What is the performance of a SSD in these conditions after a while ?

PATA can support TRIM, but getting there through a SATA bridge with an OS < Windows 7 is going to be really tough, so you are probably safe assuming you are not going to be able to use TRIM in circumstances like this.

Looking at the documentation on this from major SSD vendors, they claim that their storage devices are designed to work reliably with or without TRIM.

My experience is that SSD's on retro computers manage to handle loads <=UDMA6 better than anything else, even after a lot of use. I've had a hard time designing a test that shows any degradation over time. I recently bought a bag of 16GB microsata devices for less than $2 per part. I'm willing to burn a couple of them in testing if there's something you want me to try.

If you are concerned about write amplification and garbage collection, consider purchasing an SSD that is >50% larger than you need and then leave leaving the space that you don't need unpartitioned.

For what I'm doing with it, all SSD are much bigger than what I need. I'm just worried about performance drop since there is no TRIM.

I believe people are grossly overestimating the effect of (lack of) TRIM...but of course would be happily be proven wrong by real-life tests 😀

George Razvan wrote on 2024-02-08, 13:17:

For what I'm doing with it, all SSD are much bigger than what I need. I'm just worried about performance drop since there is no TRIM.

but not worried about CF card that never supported TRIM to begin with? 😀

George Razvan wrote on 2024-02-08, 13:17:

For what I'm doing with it, all SSD are much bigger than what I need. I'm just worried about performance drop since there is no TRIM.

I don't have hard evidence, but my suspicion is that it will be hard to see the difference between a trimmed SSD and an untrimmed SSD if the SSD supports SATA III (600MB/s) and you are running it on UDMA6 (133MB/s) or slower bus. The SSD should have a lot of headroom compared to the pipe connecting it to your computer to allow for some significant degradation and not suffer much for it. So maybe there's some increased latency on writes? Maybe? So instead of being 0.15ms, it ends up being 0.25ms? It's sort of thing that's close to the uncertainty horizon on a retro PC. Unless it's a really crappy SSD that has dogfish slow flash or something. It's still likely to be faster $ per $ than almost all CF's and DOM's out there.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-02-08, 16:26:

but not worried about CF card that never supported TRIM to begin with? 😀

Some newer CF's support trim. If anyone figures out how to use it on a vintage PC, let me know!

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-02-08, 16:26:

George Razvan wrote on 2024-02-08, 13:17:

For what I'm doing with it, all SSD are much bigger than what I need. I'm just worried about performance drop since there is no TRIM.

but not worried about CF card that never supported TRIM to begin with? 😀

CF cards never had trim because they were never inteded to replace hard drives. I don't see CF as a solution, unless used with Dos and Windows 3.11,and for 486 or below only.