Perhaps a CF or SD-card to IDE adapter would be a better idea? Seems to me it would be cheaper, and the capacity would be adequate for older software.

Jorpho wrote:

Perhaps a CF or SD-card to IDE adapter would be a better idea? Seems to me it would be cheaper, and the capacity would be adequate for older software.

From what I've been reading on the forums here, that's a good solution for a dos machine and maybe win95. Seems like a CF to IDE adapter is not a good solution for win98 because the performance is abysmal.

Yes, I can confirm that. I'd bought a 266x(I think) CF 2GB card, and it's very fast on any PC up to a Pentium. But if you compare it to a UDMA66 HDD, it's slower.

At this point you could just get a PCI SATA card and buy a real, modern SSD. I've been thinking about it myself actually. The smallest models are plenty big for old machines and they aren't crazy expensive anymore. This would solve all storage speed issues and be silent.

I don't mind using my collection of silent leftover 80-120GB HDDs though. As long as they don't have bearing noise they are ok by me.

It's amazing how many older IDE drives I have in my collection that are still working even with bearing noise 😜

I have some from both Seagate and WD and one from IBM before they sold their storage division to Hitachi.

Strangely, one of the older drives I have is a Quantum Fireball that is still very quiet...

On Topic:

I like the idea of using some sort of SSD tech for an older machine, from both a power and a noise standpoint.

I think you can still find some of the old technology that used SIMM's and/or DIMM's on a PCI card too.

Is a PCI SATA controller likely to work in DOS without any drivers?

As long as the controller is set to IDE/legacy mode (IOW, not RAID or anything), you shouldn't need any drivers... it'll appear to DOS just like any other IDE controller.

Jeez $60 for 16GB doesn't sound like a great deal to me. Back in the begining of 2009 I bought a 64GB for $130 and later that year another for $150 for Raid 0 on my Win7 x64 machine. Seems like prices have gone up for comparable drives since then.

Even the older Jmicron controllers should saturate most ATA-100 or Sata 150 speads (remember peak PCI bus is like 133MB/s) can even handle in reads. IIRC a single of my G.Skill Jmicron has peak up to 150MB/s read and 80MB/s write. So even the older SSDs should fit the bill.

Also remember reading an article that Win2k was the best OS for SSD's and Win98 was second choice, Be aware some extras will/might not work though. Wear-Leveling, Trim and such which can lead to early failure.

I've thought about SSD, but these issues scare me off. I'm still looking into either a smaller IDE or Sata drive.

EDIT: back real quick. If you are using windows98se you'd be better off with finding a sale on a 500-640GB WD Caviar Black, a Sata controller, and the LBA-48Bit patch for as good as performance for the SSD's your looking at. 😀

The practical PCI peak is more like ~95MB/s, depending on motherboard/chipset quality, and that's assuming only one PCI device is active. 😀 VIA chipsets can sometimes dip down to around 30-40MB/s due to various factors. 😁

The SSD wear thing is certainly a popular worry, with entire forums devoted to discussing it endlessly and tweaking guides designe. IMO the hardware is developing so fast that the current stuff will be entirely unexciting in a couple of years anyway so if it dies I really won't get too caught up on it.

The Sandforce drives actually do some nifty transparent lifetime management that should be filesystem and OS agnostic. This is probably the future. More advanced self-managing SSDs.