I accidentally put the CF power cable next to the PC speaker today. It gave a reasonable approximation of early 90's hard drive noise. It makes the clicky seek noises and even has something that sounds like a spin-up noise.
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Hard drive vs solid state can be an emotional issue. I understand why some people want to use spinning disks and more power to them. I have an XT with an old MFM drive and I love it. I enjoy pugging it in and powering it up once a year to make sure it still works and to keep the platters from seizing . But I don't do much with that system other than wax nostalgic. In systems that I'm doing stuff with, though? I prefer solid state rather than racking up more power-on cycles on an device that is daily inching closer to the MTBF rating.
So disk vs solid state is a choice that's hard to quantify.
I think the more interesting question is if you have decided on solid state, which solid state to choose? CF , DOM, SD2IDE, or Sata SSD.
DOMs are nice if you want to reduce cable clutter. The limitations with DOMs are that they are less portable and if want to go faster than UDMA2, you have to mod your device or get an male to male cross over cable.
SD2IDE can be nice if you are using something slower than a Socket 7 and you have plenty of SD cards on hand. The down side with the FC1307 (FC1309) based Sintechi units is that they don't support the SD UHS speeds or Ax features. So you are stuck with a 25MB/s throughput limit and there's no wear leveling. Also, the micro sd cards are pretty hard to fish out of a case if you drop them in there.
Sata SSD cards are pretty affordable in the 16GB and 32GB sizes right now. They are the clear performance winners. If you are using windows 2000 or newer or your system supports sata, I'd recommend them without reservation and they usually support trim too. The down side is if you have an older system, you have to stack a couple adapters together to make inexpensive mSata or M2 sata devices work with 40pin pata.
But for Windows 98? I think CF devices hit the sweet spot can for price, performance, compatibility and portability in that eco system if you can find the right CF cards. After that, the only questions that remain are "Do I want to get a male or female CF adapter" and "Do I want to set ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 in Win98se"?