Yes, because the 2001 drive sounds like a coffee grinder.. I've got an Intel SSD in my main retro PC with adapter, and an industrial flash DOM in my old retro PC. Both are silent, and lovely and fast, albeit much slower than in a modern SATA or NVMe system.

An SSD is always worth it, no matter what the system.

keenmaster486 wrote:

An SSD is always worth it, no matter what the system.

Agreed. My K6-2+ rig runs Win2K on a 120GB Intel SSD through a Promise SATA TX2 Plus controller and Win98SE on a 32GB compact flash card. I have it set so the OS drives are more or less hidden from each other, but share an 80GB Seagate drive for data.

Well I have a 320gb IDE I use for data, but I prefer to keep it seperate from the OS as far as on a partition incase something with ME goes screwy which we all know increases in chance every 30 seconds 🤣

C'mon, man. The noise is a big part of it! 🤣

I kinda hate how my retro machines don't make the right sounds anymore. You can barely hear the late 200+ gig IDE drives let alone the solid state stuff.

Personally, I would take either an SD or CF Card with an IDE adapter over an SSD for both cost and compatibility reasons for older operating systems only. OR running an SSHD is a really good option as well.

On a old system you will not have trim and as such I'm not a big fan of using a ssd on such a old system. You can trim the drive manually but that only does so much. I rather use a newer sata hdd or a raptor hdd, but that's just me.
With a raptor hdd you still jet the sound of a old hdd, but the preform within a stones though of some ssd.

I have used various SSDs with the cheapo Jmicron based SATA PATA adapters. I think the oldest hardware I've used is ASUS P5A. But yeah you can feel the near instantaneous access times even with 98SE on a K6-3. From what I gather, Sandforce is a good choice for non TRIM situations. If you don't fill the SSD it may not matter much anyway. Use ATA Secure Erase before you install so it is a clean slate.

But practically it's not THAT exciting on such slow hardware. I also use quiet FDB equipped PATA HDDs. No whiny ball bearing spinner coffee grinders here anymore.

If you're using hardware that's post y2k then yeah SSD is the way to go for the OS drive.

hmm thats something to think about, i was just gonna buy a cheap 8gb SSD on ebay for 9 bucks 🤣

candle_86 wrote:

hmm thats something to think about, i was just gonna buy a cheap 8gb SSD on ebay for 9 bucks 🤣

Those may very well be slower than a conventional hard drive, although may be not a 2001 hard drive. 😀

Jade Falcon wrote:

On a old system you will not have trim and as such I'm not a big fan of using a ssd on such a old system. You can trim the drive manually but that only does so much. I rather use a newer sata hdd or a raptor hdd, but that's just me.
With a raptor hdd you still jet the sound of a old hdd, but the preform within a stones though of some ssd.

True, but old systems are often read-only and only a few use swap files or log when a file was accessed the last time (time stamp).
So old systems like DOS or AmigaOS are quite SSD friendly even though they don't support trim command.
Windows 3.1 in standard mode is also quite flash friendly (no swap). 😀

WfW in enhanced mode is also okay, because it doesn't access the SSD if the system is idle (in W9x, the hdd led always flashes).
It will only access the disk and write into swap if you load new programs or a lot of data.
Of course, you can always disable the swap file regardless of the mode, but then you will loose Win32s compatibility.

I personally bought a big lot of 16GB CF cards, and a lot of CF/IDE adapters and I use that in my retro machines. I have yet to use the full 16GB on any of them. Speed-wise, they fly. And no noise. 😀

so its a Promise ATA 133 TX2 card, please tell me I ordered a decent controller

candle_86 wrote:

so its a Promise ATA 133 TX2 card, please tell me I ordered a decent controller

It's a good controller, but if you are going to have an IDE controller with a SATA adapter you might as well just get a SATA Controller so you don't have to use an adapter.

I used to run my OS on the cheapest HDD (WD Green) I had.
The system took minutes to boot and was utterly useless.

Then I thought, hey, let's get a SSD!
So I bought the SanDisk z400s 256GB as soon as it hit the market (under 60 bucks!!)

Even though the SSD is running at SATA2 due to chipset constraints, it performs wonderful.
My 2007 PC feels like something recent again 😁

Any system will fly with SSD or CF cards.

I use one CF card for testing all systems. Even loaded Win95/98 on some.

But if you want to replicate old system then old hdd is a must. Grinding and slow loading times are all part of that feeling 😁

I like to have both winchester and solid state drives on my system. I like having the winchester as my primary. An old system just isn't the same without all the weird HDD noises. I have a CF slot on most of my systems and swap around a single card just to transfer files.

kixs wrote:

Any system will fly with SSD or CF cards.

I use one CF card for testing all systems. Even loaded Win95/98 on some.

But if you want to replicate old system then old hdd is a must. Grinding and slow loading times are all part of that feeling 😁

I kinda agree here, but I will admit that if I ever got the chance to get my hands on a lot of nice, smallish and affordable SSDs, I'd probably get a few to try them out. And in the end, this is a matter of personal preference also.

But otoh, I've already got some nice alternatives which I already invested in. My most favorite for older systems are a batch of 20GB IDE laptop drives. Even though these are 20GB 2.5in drives, they were very modern for their size (2006-ish?) and are very silent and fast. Not quite good enough for XP imo, but for 9x it is perfect...and it's a real harddrive 😀.

Personally I don't really mind longer loading times, these are to me part of the experience and if it really takes that long, I can always go do something else for a couple minutes...just like I used to do in the old days 😀

Not disagreeing with the fact that SSDs are great for older systems, but newer HDDs are also a good and quiet option.

I've tried Win98 on big modern HDDs and the OS just flies Win98 "snappiness" on a new HDD is similar to that of a modern OS like Win7 running on a laptop with a mid-grade SSD. Newer hard drives are obviously much faster than the older ones, and the sequential read/write speed is often better than a really cheap and/or old SSD.

With the HDD you also don't compromise on storage capacity.