Let's be honest, any PCI SATA controller will be faster than the UDMA33 built into the 440 chipset.
It is Silicon Image that provides UDMA66-level performance.
On the I815 with UDMA100, the IDE bridge to SATA (based on Jmicron) is already faster.

Thanks so much for the responses, guys! I'm pleasantly surprised how great this community is.

shevalier, unfortunately, I fdon't have a CD-ROM drive of FDD, yet.

Chkcpu, thank you so much for taking time to looking into & diagnosing the issue. That was extremely helpful! I totally forgot about the AWARD BIOS 32GB limitation and the 32GB jumpers that was present on some of the HDDs back then, what a blast from the past!
I'm curious & would like to learn about the tools you've used to look into the BIOS files. For some reason, the Award BIOS Editor doesn't recognize the microcode for example.
Now that we know what the issue is, with regards to how to proceed with the BIOS upgrade... I ordered an SD-to-IDE adapter and will first try the 8GB SD card I found lying around at home. However, the options you mentioned are also interesting, and will be my backup plan

- I used to have an EEPROM programmer ~20 years ago, but alas, no longer. It looks like ~$70 these days.
- There are IDE HDDs with 10-20GB capacities on eBay, but of course,II will also need to buy some sort of adapter to write anything into them using my modern computer.
- With floppy, I will have the similar issue, how do I transfer files into a floppy in the first place. But perhaps you're referring to FDD emulators like the GoTek one, which are currently seeling at $24.
- I'm wondering if limiting the HDD capacity by manually entering cylinders (<65536)/heads/sectors in BIOS as well.

All good options worth trying, the only point to consider is of course the cost.

maxtherabbit, of course, you do you. But I prefer having a USB 2.0 card, I have used those before back in the day, and they are a plus to me. But I'm curious as to what kind of workload do you have in my that would be bottlenecked by the CPU usage of the USB 2.0 card? For file transfers from a USB disk, it is a substantial improvement, and I wouldn't mind it keeping the CPU busy during those transfers. Another use case for me is USBODE-CIRCLE, which has known issues with USB 1.1. If you're referring to games, Celeron 466MHz is actually already overkill for the games that I'm planning to run on this computer. Games from 2000+ run fine on my modern desktop anyway. Another use case, the mainboard has only 2 USB 1.1 ports, which is too few.

douglar, thank for the suggestion. I will try the Rosewill RC-212 (which is also VIA) and see how it goes. As shevalier pointed out, the internal IDE with UDMA33 is already a low starting point, so any PCI-SATA that works sould be an improvement. I did see Promise S150 TX2 recommended in a different thread as well, but the cheapest one I was able to find is $175 on eBay which is too much to justify this hobby project.

Back to the 120GB SSD.
Prepared a bootable disk with the lite FreeDOS image (32MB), and then the copied Award Flash Utility 7.96 along with the new BIOS in it.
Manual CHS settings (1024/16/63, ~528MB) in the BIOS with IDE2SAT2 + 40-wire cable didn't work either, it still hangs at the same BIOS screen, once the HDD detection finishes.
Waiting for the SD-IDE adapter to try next.

The issue with the USB 2.0 cards isn't that they occupy the CPU when you're actively doing file transfers, it's that they do it when you're not. There have been many threads here on it over the years.

In response to the OP: Test with a small SATA HDD instead of the SSD.

If the BIOS detects the HDD -> SSD quirks need resolving.
If the BIOS fails to detected the HDD -> Adapter quirks need resolving.

Some people report issues connecting via sata controllers with sata 2 or sata 3 storage, but I don’t think that’s a guaranteed problem. Might be more of a bios issue. There are a lot of bios images you can try here: https://theretroweb.com/chips/4807 I’d love to hear what combo works for you.

maxtherabbit, I don't remember being bother by that in the past, but it's been more than 2 decades, I'll check it. Thanks for letting me know.

MattRocks, thanks for the suggestion. The smallest HDD I have is unfortunately 2TB, so that would be something I'd need to buy. Good advice.

douglar, worth a try indeed, the brand-less SATA PCI card that I have seems to have the EEPROM SST39SF010A which may not be usable according to some other threads here, but once I get the system up and running, I will try to flash it nonetheless and if that doesn't work will try to mod the BIOS to include the PCI ROM as suggested above. In the meanwhile, Rosewill RC-212 should arrive soon, which is supposed to have a functional BIOS of its own.

Sounds like all of your storage related issues will be solved with the SD to IDE. It will be a fixed disk on the old system and also allow you to write files to it on a modern system. It's the route I ended up going down as well, although I use it along side a 20GB IDE HDD to get some clicky-clacky as well.

If you have no other removable storage at all, you will need to make the SD card bootable with DOS and also copy the OS disc files onto it using your modern system. The easy way is to use the pre-made SD image that some kind soul uploaded to IA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmx3SzRaNYA

NeoG_, the fact that this is a thing is reassuring to know, thanks! The SD to IDE adapter will arrive tomorrow.

However, I just had a success by defining a 8GB HPA using

1hdparm -N p16514064 --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing /dev/sdX

it gave a bunch of errors

1setting max visible sectors to 16514064 (permanent)
2SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 01 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 00 1d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
3SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 01 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 00 1d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
4SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 01 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 00 1d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
5 max sectors   = 16514064/1, HPA setting seems invalid (buggy kernel device driver?)

but after disconnecting & connecting the device to my modern computer, fdisk shows 7.68GiB. I put this back into the retro computer, and it worked! I reflashed the BIOS. Finally, I'm in the business 😀

Once I install Windows 98, I'll play around with the no-name SATA PCI card until Rosewill arrives.

Still waiting for the new NEC based USB PCI card to be delivered as well.

For anyone planning to use hdparm -N, before you do anything, make sure to note down the number of sectors in your device, using

1fdisk -l /dev/sdX

for example. You will need this number to restore your drive back to its original size afterwards using

1hdparm -N p<originalsectors>