Also we await news from New Zealand where they're getting a powerful hit from a solar flare overnight.

I think I got misquoted a lot in recent posts. Lots of stuff attributed to me that I didn’t write. Anyway….

If you are really concerned about the life span, you can set “conservative swapfile usage” =1 in your system.ini but really, SSD’s were designed to handle XP level work loads without trim, which are much heavier than Win98se.

douglar wrote on 2024-10-02, 02:40:

I think I got misquoted a lot in recent posts. Lots of stuff attributed to me that I didn’t write. Anyway….

Ups, sorry! Corrected it, this wasn't intentional! Thanks for mentioning! 😀

kind regards
soggi

soggi wrote on 2024-10-02, 02:03:

Unfortunately there's no TBW value for my HDDs on the screenshots, so I can't really classify this. On first sight it seems 39.2 TBW is a bit low for a main PC in 4.25 years...but it's just my thought when I summarize my DLs, copying data and stuff (not to speak of TMP files, logs and virtual memory).

Nice statistics (I really looked at them), but you forgot this thread is about Windows 98 SE storage options - it's called "Storage options for Windows 98SE?". I said this more than once (f.e. "I was talking about inadequacies of SSDs in general and specifically on WinXP and earlier. "). Yes, right, I additionally was talking about WinXP, but it shares with Win98SE that it basically also doesn't support SSDs and additionally both don't fully support the HDDs/SSDs from the stats you linked to - I know there are some (older SSDs) with manufacturer tools supporting XP that way. SSDs will age faster on such systems. And there's another problem - the more the SSD is filled, the more the rest of the cells are strained. I have very often the case that a partition or the complete HDD is filled ~90% or more and the rest gets a lot of writes.

I'm not concerned about SSD performance degradation on a Windows 98 system and if I were, I would just secure erase the drive and restore from backup which will restore the drive's full performance.

I'm definitely not concerned about long term reliability because, as shown as above, spinning drives have tended to be less reliable (especially comparing new SSDs versus 20+ year old PATA HDDs), and I have backups of all my systems in case of a storage failure regardless the technology that storage media uses.

And I am also not concerned with exhausting the drive's write endurance (which for the 32 GB PSD330 I have is 20 TBW). I am only using about 5 GB of space, I could rewrite the entire file system daily for 11 years before I hit the TBW threshold. I don't even run the system daily, let alone rewrite the entire file system when I do.

Look, flash storage in general and SSDs in specific are a known quantity as they have been in the marketplace for over 15 years. We know about their reliability characteristics, we know what usage patterns they are good at, and we know about their performance. Your issue re: their usage seems to extend beyond PATA/Windows 98 don't support TRIM but all those concerns were addressed by the industry a long time ago.

soggi wrote on 2024-10-02, 02:03:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-09-30, 03:06:

And if you're worried about garbage collection, just leave the system idling at the BIOS overnight once per month, and it will do that on its own.

How does it work? What's the difference being in a AMI/(Phoenix-)Award BIOS and being in DOS or Win9x in that case?

The BIOS manufacturer and OS are irrelevant, the SSD just needs to be in an idle state for Garbage Collection to kick in. The easiest way to accomplish that is to have the BIOS screen open. Just make sure that the power management settings in the BIOS are not configured to put your disks to sleep after a while. These instructions are taken straight from Crucial's website:

Crucial's website wrote:

On a PC, power on with the SSD installed and enter your system's BIOS or UEFI (please refer to your system manufacturer’s documentation on how to access the BIOS). Leave the system in this menu for 6-8 hours, which will power the SSD but not execute any operations, allowing Garbage Collection to run.

On that note, this isn't specific to Crucial only, other manufacturers implement it in a similar way on modern SSDs. Also, it's recommended to leave about 10% of the SSD capacity unused and unformatted for this to work better. Like a manual way of over provisioning.

Ah OK, thx! With AMI/(Phoenix-)Award I just wanted to make clear that I mean classic BIOS and not (U)EFI. 😉

BTW the better citation (in my eyes) would be the following as it is more complete:

https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-ssd/trim-and-ssd-performance-importance wrote:

Because not all operating systems support Trim, Crucial SSDs have a special feature called Active Garbage Collection. Active Garbage Collection is a process that helps an SSD maintain optimal performance by freeing up memory sectors that are no longer in use. Garbage collection is part of the SSD itself and not dependent on your computer’s operating system. Because garbage collection is part of the SSD’s firmware, it works regardless of which operating and filing systems your computer is using.

Note: Garbage collection only works when your Crucial SSD is idle, so make sure to configure your system so it doesn’t go to sleep when it’s idling. Garbage Collection takes time to do its job, but as long as it gets time to idle every now and then, your Crucial SSD will maintain its high level of performance over time.

kind regard
soggi

momaka wrote on 2024-10-01, 17:03:

Well, to make a proper apples to apples comparison, and since you say you still have those HDDs, perhaps (if you have the time and interest to do so) you can hook them up to a working system and do a benchmark with HD Tune. Also check the SMART logs prior the benchmark and after it. This will often tell if there's any "funny business" going on with the HDD. To get more accurate results, make sure that either the HDD is formatted (blank) or that File Indexing is turned off in Windows for that particular HDD (I personally turn off File Indexing for ALL of my HDDs in Windows, because I find the indexing service always tries to index stuff in the worst possible time and interrupts my work/gaming/PC activities.)

Also, there's a good chance those 750 GB and 500 GB Seagate HDDs you have are from the 7200.10/11/12 line (but in 2.5" form), and these IME tend to be a lot more problematic than the 7200.9 and 7200.7 series.

soggi wrote on 2024-10-02, 02:03:

I believe, you're telling your true experience...but it's still weird because I didn't have such a behavior with any HDD and I can't see what's the reason for that. BTW the HDDs (see the screenshots) are also 2.5" and one is placed in the T60 and the other is an external in a case...they also made many thousands of kilometers via car, flights and train.

I don't wanna go to much offtopic, so I'll be brief.
Currently I only have one of those HDDs in hand. I can hook it either directly to the same laptop or, either, using an USB adapter and hook it up to my Desktop (don't wanna to go through installing it directly). I can then test it with HD tune or Crystaldisk before and after a clean format. I'll try to do it next week.