As you may have read in another topic I made yesterday, I tried to migrate my (Windows 98) Pentium 233 to an SSD drive, replacing my old and noisy 80GB Seagate that emitted a very annoying high pitched whine that even my headphones couldn't block.
To be honest, I expected the PC to not even recognize the drive - I remember having a lot of headaches in the 90's getting my motherboard to even detect large modern drives. I had bought a cheap SATA-to-IDE controller off Aliexpress, hooked up the FAT32 formatted SSD to the CD drive cables and ... it detected it. Windows 98 (installed on my old drive) showed an empty 120GB drive. Success!
But ... this PC is also used for later DOS games and when I inserted my standard boot disk, the system froze for over 5 minutes when ending config.sys before it would continue. The moment I try to access the SSD drive, it froze. Believing it couldn't handle the large partition, I partitioned it to 8GB & 112GB. The 8GB partition (1st partition) worked fine and I installed Windows 98 without any hitch (after cloning the old drive failed to make it bootable I should add). Again, booting Windows 98: no problem. Booting to DOS: freezing. I spent two hours pulling the drive, hooking it up to my Windows 10, resizing the partition, plugging it back in ... and nothing worked. Even a tiny 2GB partition would freeze the PC.
Next step was to just give up on a second partition and to make the most out of the first. Reason the first was 8GB, was because I could do a straight clone from the original drive. The clone that for some reason failed even though it was a sector-by-sector clone. So I did Tabula Rasa: got rid of all partitions and started to test the drive against the boot disk with just a single partition. This way I found that 32GB is the maximum size the boot disk can handle without freezing.
Reinstalling Windows 98, overwriting the install with a backup from my original drive and voila! My PC now fully runs off an SSD of which it can use about 25%. Still, 32GB is plenty for a Windows 98 machine I'd say.
Long story short: was it worth it? Well, yes. 6 hours of searching but it works now. Finding the limitations were a test of patience but for €25 I now have a silent, durable and fast 32GB drive for a 24 year old PC. Not bad I'd say considering the hard drive is by far the weakest component of PC's that old (with perhaps the exception of the PSU). You do lose the nostalgic clicking noises when reading but the high pitched metallic whine I won't miss ...
Retro game fanatic.
IBM PS1 386SX25 - 4MB
IBM Aptiva 486SX33 - 8MB - 2GB CF - SB16
IBM PC350 P233MMX - 64MB - 32GB SSD - AWE64 - Voodoo2
PIII600 - 320MB - 480GB SSD - SB Live! - GF4 Ti 4200
i5-2500k - 3GB - SB Audigy 2 - HD 4870