mothergoose729 wrote:

w98..... write speeds are stuck at 4MB/s

was it like thaty from the start? of after using this drive with w98 for a while? because this sounds like drive failing to trim itself - I killed a Sandisk SSD like that, using it in Win7 with trim disabled for a ~year made the drive write at 1MB/s max.

The drive is fine. Adding DMA and switching to IDE moves the write speeds back to 33mb/s. The same model in my XP machine saturates the SATA 3 bus. The lack of TRIM does hurt performance, but not by that much, and not that quickly on a fresh format.

The first lesson of SATA PATA adapters and SATA PCI cards is they often have some kind of compatibility quirk. And it's hard to be sure they aren't just defective in some way. Or that your old motherboard isn't defective in some way, or has quirks with some kinds of PCI cards as is quite possible. 😀 I've tested some Chinese SATA PATA adapters at ~95MB/s. That's basically saturation of UDMA 133. Maybe you just got an especially lame (or somewhat defective) one. I have one that connects to the motherboard port and some that connect to the drive. Or could it be the particular drive not liking it?

I usually just use a circa 2003 hard drive instead these days. It's easiest and it's really not all that slow.

I like the Promise SATA I 150 SATA controllers. They have drivers for Windows 9x.

Promise also made some SATA II 150 controllers but there are no drivers for them for Windows 9x.

I also have a Promise SATA 150 TX2. It works, but my Abit BF6 is really picky about which PCI slot you use which cards in. Some motherboards are like that. You can flush hours of time trying to figure out the slot that won't randomly cause freezing. Or maybe you'll just have some silent data corruption. One never knows the fun that might await! 😀

cyclone3d wrote:

I like the Promise SATA I 150 SATA controllers. They have drivers for Windows 9x.

Promise also made some SATA II 150 controllers but there are no drivers for them for Windows 9x.

That is what I would get. I haven't read too many opinions on how well they work though, only vague implications that it can work, but might not.

swaaye wrote:

The first lesson of SATA PATA adapters and SATA PCI cards is they often have some kind of compatibility quirk. And it's hard to be sure they aren't just defective in some way. Or that your old motherboard isn't defective in some way, or has quirks with some kinds of PCI cards as is quite possible. 😀 I've tested some Chinese SATA PATA adapters at ~95MB/s. That's basically saturation of UDMA 133. Maybe you just got an especially lame (or somewhat defective) one. I have one that connects to the motherboard port and some that connect to the drive. Or could it be the particular drive not liking it?

I usually just use a circa 2004 hard drive instead these days. It's easiest and it's really not all that slow. Quiet fluid bearing equipped WD 80GB 7200RPM 8MB cache drive.

Would it be possible for you to link to the exact adapter you use? 95mb/s would be plenty, I would only get maybe 120mb/s on a SATA I anyhow.

I would use a regular hard drive if it were still possible to buy one brand new with a PATA interface. I just don't feel confident putting any data on a drive that is more than 10 years old 😒

swaaye wrote:

I also have a Promise SATA 150 TX2. It works, but my Abit BF6 is really picky about which PCI slot you use which cards in. Some motherboards are like that. You can flush hours of time trying to figure out the slot that won't randomly cause freezing. Or maybe you'll just have some silent data corruption. One never knows the fun that might await! 😀

That is exactly the kind of thing I don't want to deal with 🤣 . I'll stick with slow IDE if it comes to that.

There are motherboards running the Intel 865 chipset with SATA ports which natively support Windows 98. Let me know your benchmark of choice and I can give you some results.

BushLin wrote:

There are motherboards running the Intel 865 chipset with SATA ports which natively support Windows 98. Let me know your benchmark of choice and I can give you some results.

I use this benchmark from Phil's website:

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/hdd-benchmarks.html

I am curious to see what you get, but at this point I am committed to a chip set that doesn't appear to have SATA drivers for 9x. If I give up and go socket 478, the 845 or 865 chipset is definitely what I would get.

mothergoose729 wrote:

I use this benchmark from Phil's website: […]
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BushLin wrote:

There are motherboards running the Intel 865 chipset with SATA ports which natively support Windows 98. Let me know your benchmark of choice and I can give you some results.

I use this benchmark from Phil's website:

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/hdd-benchmarks.html

I am curious to see what you get, but at this point I am committed to a chip set that doesn't appear to have SATA drivers for 9x. If I give up and go socket 478, the 845 or 865 chipset is definitely what I would get.

I assume you wanted the ATTO benchmark, ran with defaults on an old Intel 60GB SSD (underclocked 45nm Pentium dual-core).

BushLin wrote:

mothergoose729 wrote:

I use this benchmark from Phil's website: […]
Show full quote

BushLin wrote:

There are motherboards running the Intel 865 chipset with SATA ports which natively support Windows 98. Let me know your benchmark of choice and I can give you some results.

I use this benchmark from Phil's website:

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/hdd-benchmarks.html

I am curious to see what you get, but at this point I am committed to a chip set that doesn't appear to have SATA drivers for 9x. If I give up and go socket 478, the 845 or 865 chipset is definitely what I would get.

I assume you wanted the ATTO benchmark, ran with defaults on an old Intel 60GB SSD (underclocked 45nm Pentium dual-core).

W98_ATTO.PNG

Those results are basically perfect. I think 122mb/s is about the upper limit of SATA I.

Also, didn't know that the 865 chipset will take pentium dual cores! That really seems like the ideal setup for windows 98.

mothergoose729 wrote:

Those results are basically perfect. I think 122mb/s is about the upper limit of SATA I.

Also, didn't know that the 865 chipset will take pentium dual cores! That really seems like the ideal setup for windows 98.

Not many 865 boards will happily accept 45nm socket 775 CPUs but the Asrock 775i65 has official support. FSB1066 support is a 166mhz fudge not running at 1:1 ratio, 800mhz bus chips work out faster so the 45nm pentiums are just the ticket and can be picked up for peanuts. This one is running at 2.4Ghz rather than 3.2Ghz to avoid issues in DOS but the underclock makes negligible difference to power consumption or temps.