I honestly wouldn't worry about it, any "decent" SD card should be good enough. The speed ratings are theoretical maxima for the cards in ideal situations. I doubt you'd be able to get anywhere near maxing out ATA133 on a Win98 rig with an IDE-SD converter. Either it'll be bottlenecked by the converter or just the speed of the system itself.

You could also try a CF card, which has essentially a native IDE interface, but those are expensive and getting hard to find. I'd just go SD personally. (That said, I still mostly use spinning discs because I have a stash of them.)

I've heard horror stories about cheap SATA-IDE converters causing problems, but get a decent one and that should be fine too. At least you get newer drives then.

My experience with SD cards (even faster ones) is that their random write speeds are atrocious, in a way that a spinning drive would be better. Also even if your card is UHS-capable, you must make sure that whatever adapter you use is capable as well (or you'll be limited to pre-UHS <25MB/s speeds).

CompactFlash is better; SSD to IDE is even better. Overkill, yes. Personally I would use a standard platter drive, if I could find one.

I use CF on my 486 DOS machine, but my understanding was that CF and SDs are not that great for doing Win98 but I am looking for long term reliability over short term speed of a platter drive.

How much better would CF be over SD?

I am using a SD to IDE from ebay. This is the one I ordered.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/SD-SDHC-Memory-Card- … 872.m2749.l2649

Hi! Welcome to the forums! It's always nice to see a new face here! 😀

The earlier posters did give some good advices, IMHO.
If you like to install a flash medium as a HDD replacement, then that's fine.

Just remember a few things:
a) FAT/FAT32 can't be aligned to 4K sectors, as NTFS can be.
So better use an older 512 Byte/per Sector HDD or flash disk with 512B/1K/2K blocks.
That's because flash cells can only be cleared blockwise.

b) Stuttering. Old flash disks weren't meant to read/write a lot during a small time period.
They were intended for digital cameras, which stored a single picture after picture.
Or record a big movie file, also sequential. Under Win9x, they may behave "jerky" because of this.
On DOS, they work fine, though. Newer cards, usually with DMA support, may perform better under Win9x.
In case of CF, make also sure the mechanical adapter has the DMA traces soldered on.

c) DOMs and IDE Flash
For booting, you use a small Disc-On-Module.
They are made for booting DOS, Windows CE and Windows 9x.
They may also work with Win NT and XP, since they appear as fixed disk drives.

d) SSHDs
If you're unsure of CF, SD and other Flash media, you can try
to get such a hybrid drive to work on an SATA-IDE adapter.

e) SATA SSDs on IDE-SATA adapter.
Speaking for myself, I think this is hit and miss.
I once got a broken adapter board that got hot and didn't work.
Second time, I got another one (one way version) for my Power Macintosh and it works fine since.

My questions are about storage drive solutions for Win 98 setups.
I know the max is 128g~ and I am leaning towards an IDE to SD card reader.

I see. There's a fix for LBA48 compatibility, if you're interested.
FAT32 iself can be used for up to 32 Terabyte (TB). FreeDOS supports that, I think.
More information: http://www.largeharddrivesupport.windowsreins … l.com/win98.htm

Not too worried about the overall size of the storage space. It's only going to be for games so I will not be bogged down by music, photos, or videos. However I am concerned about overall speed and usability as well as long term reliability.

What would be the overall benefit of the SSHD???

Vanessaira wrote:

First question. Is there any point to go with an SD UHS II card that has a faster read write speed then 133mb/s? My understanding is that IDE read write speeds are limited up to 133mb/s. So even if I went and got something like this. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?I … =9SIAFVF75E1964 I would not get any benefit because of the limit on speed? ...

Two things:

• While the IDE standard for non-CompactFlash devices goes up to 133MB/s, your IDE controller needs to support it. There are several speed grades, and I believe the southbridge chips on most (all?) Super Socket 7 boards can only do up to Ultra ATA/33. That's a 33MB/s cap.
• The PCI bus itself on those boards is limited to 133MB/s, tops. So, if you were to plug in an ATA/133 PCI IDE controller or 1.5Gbps SATA card to get around the limits of the southbridge, your fast SD card or SSD will still be capped at roughly 133MB/s.

So, at least for sequential transfers, you would not get any real performance benefit from buying one of those premium SD cards, or from using an SSD via IDE-to-SATA adapter or PCI SATA card.

This does not affect access latency, however, which plays a bigger part in the "feel" of a system than maximum transfer speeds do. Flash memory in general has a huge leg-up over HDDs in this regard, but some CF/SD cards and old SSDs do exhibit the sort of "stuttering" behaviour that someone else in this thread already mentioned. You may have to experiment with a few different cards to get a system that runs smoothly.

You can still find NEW Seagate IDE hard-drives on eBay.com 7,200rpm.

I have two IDE to SATA adapters that I use with Seagate hdds. They have more than enough performance to saturate a UDMA 66 interface.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

You can still find NEW Seagate IDE hard-drives on eBay.com 7,200rpm.

gdjacobs wrote:

I have two IDE to SATA adapters that I use with Seagate hdds. They have more than enough performance to saturate a UDMA 66 interface.

I could look into that as well. I have two adapters that I got for cheap awhile back. I also have some 10000 rpm Raptor drives in storage somewhere but I think that would be a waste.

Did not know that about a PCI IDE controller. I may look into this as well as looking at the specs for my board. It's a Gigabyte GA 5AX so I will see what info I can find on the transfer rates.

Thank you everyone again.

Vanessaira wrote:

What would be the overall benefit of the SSHD???

Sorry for delay, stressy days here. 😅
SSHDs are neat since they include a portion of on-board SLC cache.

It's essentially an SSD, but is controlled by the HDD controller as a chache inbehind (ie, not visible to the OS).
Size is about 4 to 8 GiB in common models. The Momentus XT was a popular model of that sort.

It had the ability to learn about user habbits and cached files -or rather sectors/clusters- that were often read.
There also was a firmware bug once, that caused data loss, but it got fixed I recall.

Phil had a video about SSHDs, too, I recall.. Anyway, just saying.
You don't have to worry about false alignment on SSHDs, since the SSD part is never misaligned.

Worst thing can happen is a read-modify-write that reduces performance by 50%,
unless the data is on the SSD cache already, of course.

Edit: I forgot to mention. All new HDDs use 4K format internally, so their write performance might not be the best on 9x.
The last native 512Byte per Sector drives were roughly made in the late 2000s (ca. 2008/2009), I believe. Before the flood.

Jo22 wrote:

Sorry for delay, stressy days here. :sweatdrop: SSHDs are neat since they include a portion of on-board SLC cache. […]
Show full quote

Vanessaira wrote:

What would be the overall benefit of the SSHD???

Sorry for delay, stressy days here. 😅
SSHDs are neat since they include a portion of on-board SLC cache.

It's essentially an SSD, but is controlled by the HDD controller as a chache inbehind (ie, not visible to the OS).
Size is about 4 to 8 GiB in common models. The Momentus XT was a popular model of that sort.

It had the ability to learn about user habbits and cached files -or rather sectors/clusters- that were often read.
There also was a firmware bug once, that caused data loss, but it got fixed I recall.

Phil had a video about SSHDs, too, I recall.. Anyway, just saying.
You don't have to worry about false alignment on SSHDs, since the SSD part is never misaligned.

Worst thing can happen is a read-modify-write that reduces performance by 50%,
unless the data is on the SSD cache already, of course.

Edit: I forgot to mention. All new HDDs use 4K format internally, so their write performance might not be the best on 9x.
The last native 512Byte per Sector drives were roughly made in the late 2000s (ca. 2008/2009), I believe. Before the flood.

Thank you SO much. I may look into this and using a PCI IDE controller to run this drive or another storage option through it, instead of the ribbons to board.