Button it up, stress test it, and see if it can take another 10-50W or whether it's already over the edge power and cooling wise.

SATA so you can use SSDs without a converter?

VIA based mobos are quite finicky to use with external RAID PATA/SATA , especially on 596B south bridge.

No SATA 😒
I'm using an older power supply - Thermaltake Purepower W0100RU 500W ATX with 32 amps on the 5 volt rail.
Cooling. I have 2 x 120mm intake fans. 1 x 120mm exhaust fan. 2 x 92mm blowing across the GPU and the two Voodoo2s. For CPU, I have a northbridge (search HB-802 heatsink on ebay) with an 80mm fan.

Pretty sure i have a Promise SATA 1-150 PCI card in the system I have an S1854 motherboard in.

Still not sure why I am even keeping the S1854 as it not one of my favorite boards. Probably because it was one of the boards we stocked when I worked at a computer store.

Wow. Never crossed my mind to look for a SATA PCI card. I could use an SSD.

w0lf42 wrote on 2021-09-15, 02:16:

Wow. Never crossed my mind to look for a SATA PCI card. I could use an SSD.

Most of them besides the Promise SATA 1 cards are either trash or don't have Win9x drivers.

Aureal Vortex 2 sound card so you can get both best out of whatever games you are playing be out A3D 2.0 or EAX.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-15, 03:15:

w0lf42 wrote on 2021-09-15, 02:16:

Wow. Never crossed my mind to look for a SATA PCI card. I could use an SSD.

Most of them besides the Promise SATA 1 cards are either trash or don't have Win9x drivers.

I agree that Promise is the best option for a PCI SATA card, but not all of them have Windows 9x drivers (check before you buy). Even a Promise Ultra133 TX2 (IDE) + JMicron or Marvell based SATA to IDE adapter can be quite reliable with SATA HDDs and SSD, in my experience (even supports TRIM of FAT32 using rloew's DOS TRIM utility).

Silicon Image SIL3114/SIL3512/SIL3112 based cards CAN be decent IF

a) you get lucky and find a well built one ( a lot of recently built ones are crap/unreliable)
b) you get with an onboard BIOS chip that is flashable (best to use non-RAID BIOS, most cards come with the RAID version)
c) you don't expect to plug more than one drive and select boot order between them
d) you don't get a hardware rev. that has data corruption issues if more than one drive is connected or you stick to only connecting one drive (AFAICR, this only affected some versions of the SIL3512 and/or SIL3112)
e) Don't expect TRIM to work if using an SSD

BUT, Silicon Image SIL3114/SIL3512/SIL3112 based cards are both inexpensive and plentiful .

I've had nothing but problems with the SIL controllers. Anything from the drives not being detected at all to data getting corrupted really quickly. This is with only a single drive connected.

I have a bunch of them and none of the models seem at all reliable to me. So much so that I have not even been able to bring myself to try selling them.

These SIL controllers had these same exact type of issues when they were built onto motherboards.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-15, 04:24:

I've had nothing but problems with the SIL controllers. Anything from the drives not being detected at all to data getting corrupted really quickly. This is with only a single drive connected.

I have a bunch of them and none of the models seem at all reliable to me. So much so that I have not even been able to bring myself to try selling them.

These SIL controllers had these same exact type of issues when they were built onto motherboards.

Well, I am not exactly recommending them, having read multiple horror stories about them, hence my list of caveats, but I have somehow had great luck with two of them so far on 3 different motherboards (two 440BX ones and one 815EP). I also have a third one with a bad EEPROM, but it also works fine, in Windows, as long as you don't expect to boot from it or use it under DOS, AFAICR . Being a glutton for punishment, I actually bought a couple of dirt cheap ones a while back for 12 $CAN each . Interestingly, that auction (same Item ID on ebay) is still going on, but the cards are now 70 $CAN each!!!! The cheapest SIL3114 cards from China now are about 20 $CAN (no idea how good or bad they are either).

As for Promise cards, they start at almost 100 $CAN with shipping in my neck of the woods (for an IDE Ultra133, SATA is more expensive). I would love to get my hands on a non Promise SATA 150 variant with Windows 98 SE, but I am not going pay those prices for one .

EDIT : Also, the VIA 596 south bridge could have issues with any of these options . Also, the Ultra133 has issues even on some 440BX boards (my PB-F, among others).

Promise based sata 1 cards seem pretty decent for XP. Kinda finicky under 98 but sometimes they work just fine to boot off of. The via and SIL ones are just. . .bleh. i wonder if there are any discrete pci Intel based sata cards

ODwilly wrote on 2021-09-15, 07:32:

Promise based sata 1 cards seem pretty decent for XP. Kinda finicky under 98 but sometimes they work just fine to boot off of. The via and SIL ones are just. . .bleh. i wonder if there are any discrete pci Intel based sata cards

No Intel ones, AFAIK . I would not touch the the VIA ones due to issues with SATA2 (and likely SATA3) drives . There are also ALI ones of which I have a mostly dead one (no idea how good/bad it might have been when working).

Other than the horror stories (which I do not doubt), there are people, other than myself, that are actually happy with SIL based cards . I have read worst things about IDE HPT366 controllers .

SCSI allows slower cdroms / cdr burners that are good for games where its installed on system without the noise of more modern IDE drives.
Also eliminating the handbrake of slowest speed is for all devices over same IDE cable as cd and dvd drives do to hard disks.
Often pointed out to newbies (in general) on dual port IDE controller ones for hard disk others for compact disc.
SCSI cards usually can boot in dos SATA cards cannot as SATA was born after dos era was abandoned for NT in PCI land .
I've decided to see what I can do with my SATA card so I may bump or write a new thread with the results.
People have said once its got its boot sector setup and card is set bootable win9x can boot over a raid set or simple disk on the raid card.

The PCI SATA RAID cards absolutely can boot in DOS. The BIOS just needs to be set to boot from SCSI as that is how those cards are presented.

I am not sure if the non-RAID ones are the same as I haven't tried one yet.

darry

you get with an onboard BIOS chip that is flashable (best to use non-RAID BIOS, most cards come with the RAID version)

That's hardly a concern for Win 9x environment. You can boot with RAID BIOS in PIO mode just fine and install drivers. In some cases you can even boot RAID array in PIO.

cyclone3d

I am not sure if the non-RAID ones are the same as I haven't tried one yet.

On old motherboards, external ATA compatible controllers usually also require SCSI option in BIOS. Because option ROMs are initialized only after you can enter BIOS.