Yup these things happen quietly. Like the last time I wanted to buy floppy disks and the super market didn't stock them anymore 😒

I can relate to that.... the last time I ordered from Spartantech I got the last black floppy they had.......

Where I live, you can still get second hand DVD PATA drives quite cheap.
Floppy drives however are getting harder to find second hand, but still not impossible (must buy a whole second hand rig to get one now).

You can buy cheap SATA to PATA adapters, but I'm not sure on the quality of them. I had a PATA to SATA adapter and it was very slow.

This makes me realize how dated some of my stuff is. Over the past year I have rebuilt several p3 machines with more modern cases....now I am realizing I cannot get drives (if the ones I have ever need replacing).

I only have one machine with even SATA connectors - and I have not even tested that yet (still need to get RAM for the board)

You can buy cheap SATA to PATA adapters, but I'm not sure on the quality of them. I had a PATA to SATA adapter and it was very slow.

They're pretty hit-or-miss. I've had quite a few of 'em... a fair number of 'em worked fine with no noticeable speed reduction, a few of 'em worked but were slow, a few didn't work at all, and one caught fire. This is all out of a batch of seemingly identical ones. And you can't really get anything but the cheap generic Chinese ones... even the branded converters I've seen are the same things with fancier packaging and a higher price tag.

The better solution for most IDE-based systems would be just to use PCI SATA cards.

Try finding SCSI DVD drives, especially writers. It took me years to find one for a reasonable price and it was DVD RAM.

The good thing is that there are sooo many CD and DVD drives out there. So there shouldn't be a shortage really. Good point about the SATA to PATA adapters. I did get one from eBay but never got around to test them 😀

Can you get SATA going under Windows 98SE? With a PCI SATA card I mean.

Try finding SCSI DVD drives, especially writers. It took me years to find one for a reasonable price and it was DVD RAM.

There are exactly zero SCSI drives that can burn standard DVD-R/RW discs. Such a thing was never made by anyone, anywhere. Pioneer made two that could do DVD-R authoring media, but that's completely different from the consumer DVD-R format.

Can you get SATA going under Windows 98SE? With a PCI SATA card I mean.

Of course. As long as you set it to non-RAID mode, it'll work just like any other IDE controller. I think some of the controller chips may even have DOS/Win9x RAID drivers (though the soft-RAID on a cheap SATA controller is kinda pointless anyhow).

SIL SATA chips (sil3112 & 3114) are supposed to work under Windows 98SE, else there is always INT13h ("Real Mode Access" or something).

http://www.drivers-download.com/en/downloadlist.php?id=153

A trend I've noticed recently is that many "new" sil311x based cards seem to lack a BIOS chip. Not sure if they integrated the BIOS into the chip itself or they aren't bootable.

That's cool! Means that at least W98 machines will have a healthy supply of optical drives for a while 😀

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

There are exactly zero SCSI drives that can burn standard DVD-R/RW discs. Such a thing was never made by anyone, anywhere. Pione […]
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Try finding SCSI DVD drives, especially writers. It took me years to find one for a reasonable price and it was DVD RAM.

There are exactly zero SCSI drives that can burn standard DVD-R/RW discs. Such a thing was never made by anyone, anywhere. Pioneer made two that could do DVD-R authoring media, but that's completely different from the consumer DVD-R format.

Can you get SATA going under Windows 98SE? With a PCI SATA card I mean.

Of course. As long as you set it to non-RAID mode, it'll work just like any other IDE controller. I think some of the controller chips may even have DOS/Win9x RAID drivers (though the soft-RAID on a cheap SATA controller is kinda pointless anyhow).

It doesn't matter anyway because you can just slap one of those SCSI-IDE bridges on the back of any IDE drive to make a SCSI DVD burner

Well, you could do that, I guess. I can't think of many instances where investing in one of the pricy SCSI->IDE bridges would be preferable to just getting an IDE or SATA card though. A system that for whatever reason can't take a IDE/SATA card probably doesn't really need a DVD burner anyway.

SIL SATA chips (sil3112 & 3114) are supposed to work under Windows 98SE

Just to restate... any SATA controller running in IDE mode, i.e., non-RAID mode on any of the standard PCI SATA1 controllers, will work natively in any PC OS that supports a hard drive. You could probably even use a SATA drive with CP/M-86 if you really wanted to... because SATA in IDE mode looks and works exactly like any other IDE controller as far as the OS is concerned. The only time you need special drivers is if you're running in RAID or AHCI mode, and the latter isn't even an option on the cheap PCI controllers.

And yes, a lot of PCI SATA cards don't have boot ROMs, for reasons I've never really understood. That's nothing new, it's been an issue as long as there have been SATA cards. Fortunately, it's not difficult to get one that does have a boot ROM... even the $7 Via-based SATA+ATA133 cards on eBay appear to have an onboard BIOS, and if you watch for 'em, bootable Si311x/351x cards come up pretty frequently for similar prices too.

The sil311x can operate in Legacy IDE Mode, however, even though the chip will look like a legacy IDE controller, it won't work like a true legacy ESDI compatible IDE controller: it won't use the ESDI I/O ports or IRQ 14/15.

As long as your OS uses INT13h and you boot from the sil311x (like CPM/86, MS-DOS and Windows 9x "Real Mode Disk Access") this won't be a problem: but OSses that access the ESDI/ATA interface directly, like Windows NT won't work. Also, the IDE interface will not be visible to Windows without drivers, so you can't connect a CD-ROM player to it without using (specially configured) real mode drivers or the sil311x native drivers.

Chipset integrated SATA controllers (ICH, etc.) however will look like an ESDI compatible interface (when set to legacy mode in the CMOS setup), and will very likely work with anything that can do ESDI (WinNT, Win 3.1 32BDA, older Linux, etc.)

You could probably use the sil311x with NT 3.x using UniATA. Also, in theory it's possible that some cards might configure the legacy interface to the appropriate IO ports and IRQ14/15 if you turn of any other controller at that address and IRQ (primary IDE and/or secondary IDE)

Basically the rules for PCI based cards are the same as for (PCI) SCSI controllers, while chipset integrated SATA can emulate ESDI/IDE perfectly when set to Legacy mode.

My CD-R 52x PATA drive just died, I was using it with headphones as a standalone CD player. RIP *melodramatic sob* 🤣 poor drive

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

And yes, a lot of PCI SATA cards don't have boot ROMs, for reasons I've never really understood. That's nothing new, it's been an issue as long as there have been SATA cards. .

Yea I got one ages ago from eBay Asia and it actually stated that it's bootable. It wasn't and they gave me the money back right away. Still got the card though.

Is there any possibility of DOS drivers for PCI SATA cards?

I just got a SECOND rude awakening trying to get some more DDR RAM for this Athlon box. Forget about getting it in the brick and mortar stores - all they have now is DDR2 and DDR3. It also seems to be very hard to find online. 😢

make sure to refuse slot-loaded (non-tray) type dvd drives,
as it usually can't accept the mini-discs (3") just in case you need to read-from/write-to one of such disc.

i encounter a nsfw games that sold using DRM-ed miniDVD media.

I wonder if you could modify the Wii optical drive to work in a PC.. It's slot-loading AND reads GameCube disks.