why waste money buying one of these old ssds that were probably already beat close to death in there past life.

just buy a new ssd that will have a 3-5 year warranty and when it fails and the warranty is gone toss it out and get a new one ssds from 120-500gb are so cheap now and even for windows 98 and stuff if u go for one over 137 gig just make the main windows partition 120 gig and make the rest of it secondary partitions.

i'm using a 250gb sand disk for my 98 machine and it works great. i made it 2 partitions.

just keep a back of the drive once u got windows drivers and games and software installed and then u won't even have to redo the install of stuff.

I use gsmartcontrol to check on the health.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-05-29, 22:32:

All of these are set for sector size of 520 not 512 byte. […]
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All of these are set for sector size of 520 not 512 byte.

Takes too much work to set up sg3 utility and then needs cygwin installed. And probably fail. At this moment previously put away the wireless router "in a bridge mode" into storage and could not find it so unable to finish the cygwin installation.

Sigh!

Safer buy:
Intel 710 100GB
Intel DC s3700 100GB
Micron P300 100GB

These three are rated for data center usage and has high endurance which made them perfect fit for windows 98SE and DOS. Also chosen for their price as well.

Cheers,

Wouldn't something like a VirtualBox VM running practically any Linux distro be an easier option ?

For the hardware connection aspect, a USB to SATA converter passed through to the VM's OS should do the trick (as long as the bridge chip used passes SCSI commands correctly), I would imagine .

I got hold of part of an EMC SAN a few years ago which had a bunch of 3TB drives in that were all 520 byte - I had to use sg3 to reformat them and that takes forever!

Regarding 3TB drives out of this datacenter computer, I bet these were hitachi or Seagate? Be cautious. Years ago, I had a HUA722020ALA330 bought used that seller claimed good which was not good as heads was reseeking. Once I detected this fault, I broke it down to find out why. Turns out spindle fluid bearing sleeve was worn enough to be too loose. By then warranty was past the use by date.

Please test your hard drive(s) and SSD(s) that are used items immediately when received since most sellers are 30 days warranty from receiving date. Must use the SMART reporting utility: crystaldiskinfo or gsmartcontrol are good.

Cheers,