zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-31, 16:42:

SSD on 98se is nothing to brag about.

A notebook SATA disk makes no noise cost much less uses less energy and lasts longer.
muliplying into a RAID set makes it access better than SSD and forget trim altogether on older SATA revision controllers.
But all modern disks are quiet these days especially SATA.
Someone should do an article and perhaps invite people to post their existing win98se storage specs with benchmarks just to prove it once and for all you can save $$$$

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-10-31, 16:50:

Ok, now I'm undecided again.

Look, it's not that complicated:

SSD:
- Absolutely silent
- Fast, though might be a bit too fast actually. Games are going to load fast, which either is going to be a plus to you or not because that's not how things were back then and it hurts your nostalgia
- Could use trimming few times a year depending how much you delete stuff on it. Even once a year could be enough for casual use
- No need to worry about it wearing itself down with swap files and other things, modern SSD's can handle it. The SSD I've been using with Windows 10 for ~6 years now is at 75% health and W10 writes way more than 98/XP. And I personally doubt you need to leave any extra space for overprovisioning. Just don't fill the thing completely with stuff

HDD:
- Modern hard drives are pretty quet, I use one on my XP machine and I actually like the cruncing noise it makes.
- Pretty fast, not as fast as SSD's of course but no need to go make coffee while the PC boots to windows
- Needs to be defragged at times, maybe once a week, which is either an annoyance to you or someting you like to do for nostalgic reasons.

That's about it, pick your poison.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-31, 17:26:

Someone should do an article and perhaps invite people to post their existing win98se storage specs with benchmarks just to prove it once and for all you can save $$$$

Want to know the funny thing? Here in Italy we have magic prices.

Kingston SSD 480 GB - 48€
WD Blue 2.5" 500GB - 60€

If, for example, 240 GB - 25% (if leaving this 25% is needed) are enough for Windows 98, you could get away with 30€.
3.5" drives prices are totally different, with 30€ you can get 500 GB.

Sombrero wrote on 2021-10-31, 17:41:

Look, it's not that complicated:

Thank you too.

About the noise, the only thing that I'm worried about is the GPUs with those little fans. Back in the day I was poor and got a fanless 5200.
Do those fans overcome the noise of the HDD and everything else? 🤣

About the "fastness" I was poor with CPU and RAM too at the time, so a Core2Duo will sure "distort" the "speed feeling" so the speed of SSD "won't make much difference".

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-10-31, 17:49:

About the noise, the only thing that I'm worried about is the GPUs with those little fans. Back in the day I was poor and got a fanless 5200.
Do those fans overcome the noise of the HDD and everything else? 🤣

Yeah, that's a thing you are going to have to deal with, depending on what card you get. Try to get a GPU that lets you either macgyver a new silent fan on the heatsink without a blowtorch or has third party coolers still available for it. I just happened to order new old stock Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 for my NVIDIA Quadro FX 3450 myself, the original fan wasn't super annoyingly loud but loud enough.

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-10-31, 16:50:

120 GB or 240 GB for Windows 98? (let's count that I will "lose" 25%)

As mentioned before, any disks larger than 127 GB will cause issues on stock Win98SE. It doesn't matter whether it's an SSD or not. And no, making a 127 GB partition on a larger disk and leaving the rest of the space unallocated won't help. You need special software such as SeaTools to properly limit drive capacity.

Phil has a video on this.

i got a bulk set of desktop SATA III 250gb @ $10.00 au each in a set of 10 + postage they pop up from time to time *brand new* but i'm not part of the union so i recommend searching bulk as 10 can cost 1

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-10-31, 18:05:

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-10-31, 16:50:

120 GB or 240 GB for Windows 98? (let's count that I will "lose" 25%)

As mentioned before, any disks larger than 127 GB will cause issues on stock Win98SE. It doesn't matter whether it's an SSD or not. And no, making a 127 GB partition on a larger disk and leaving the rest of the space unallocated won't help. You need special software such as SeaTools to properly limit drive capacity.

Phil has a video on this.

I used a drive papacity patch to run a single 500gb PATA partition on millennium.
As long as the drive hardware controller has LBA48 (in case of SATA of course it does) anything up to 3tb can run a single fat32 partition on 98se or else AHCI patch is needed then can have a multitute of up to 3TB fat32 partitions on a hard disk.
due to the 4gb file size limitation i only see this useful as a network storage initiative.
However, the more dense the capacity the faster it can read and write so this is a milestone to move from windows 11 to 98se 🤣

Sombrero wrote on 2021-10-31, 18:03:

Try to get a GPU that lets you either macgyver a new silent fan on the heatsink without a blowtorch or has third party coolers still available for it.

The problem is that finding a GPU at a decent price is very hard, at least here where I can count only on eBay. Almost everyone here suggested the FX5900XT as the perfect GPU, but those I saw at indecent prices have all just a little fan, no big heatsink to attach a fan. Phil made a video with a chinese cooler saying that it's silent, even if the McGuyver solution with a Noctua fan would be awesome.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-10-31, 18:05:

And no, making a 127 GB partition on a larger disk and leaving the rest of the space unallocated won't help. You need special software such as SeaTools to properly limit drive capacity.

NO! Do not destroy my feelings. 🤣
How is it possible that @chinny22 made all those partitions on a 500 HDD? He used a patched fdisk.

This could be solved by simply buying a 120GB SSD if the space is enough for a Win98 build.

windows 98 was good enough with 32gb disk back in the day but a multitude of 128gb partitons on a single 500gb+ disk one best disable recycle bins on each one.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-31, 18:49:

windows 98 was good enough with 32gb disk back in the day but a multitude of 128gb partitons one best disable recycle bins on each one.

So basically if I buy a SATA SSD/HDD over 128 GB I have to put SATA in "legacy mode", partition the drive (with something like Partition Magic on Win10 or a patched fdisk) making a 2GB primary partition, run Windows 98 setup, let it format the partition to FAT32, install it, patch it, put SATA back in "normal mode" and make FAT32 partitions for the rest of the drive?

Did I get that correctly?

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-10-31, 19:15:

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-31, 18:49:

windows 98 was good enough with 32gb disk back in the day but a multitude of 128gb partitons one best disable recycle bins on each one.

So basically if I buy a SATA SSD/HDD over 128 GB I have to put SATA in "legacy mode", partition the drive (with something like Partition Magic on Win10 or a patched fdisk) making a 2GB primary partition, run Windows 98 setup, let it format the partition to FAT32, install it, patch it, put SATA back in "normal mode" and make FAT32 partitions for the rest of the drive?

Did I get that correctly?

I use Super FDISK, and have used it to partition and format a 240 gigabyte drive to a 120 gig active partition to install Win98. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5ivV5tyfRs

I use the Transcend SSD370S (32GB, also higher capacities available, SATA III, MLC NAND Flash and DRAM Cache) together with a Delock SATA - PATA adapter (both available at Amazon.de) in some of my retro pc's. That combo works stable in all my retro pc's with Intel and VIA chipsets. It doesn't work properly with an Asus P5A board (ALi chipset), installation of Windows 98SE freezes if I remember correctly. An alternative I also use is a new old stock Seagate Barracuda PATA hard disk (plenty of them available on ebay).

I know that I may sounded (and sounding) like the guy who wants to "build a Windows 98 machine and be sure to avoid its problems at all costs" but it's really not like that. I'm not against "losing my time" with all the oddities I will meet (again), but I'm not against planning a compatible and easily maintainable configuration either. And with my little knowledge I'm asking for help, and I'm getting A LOT of precious help.

I see your "VM evangelist point" 🤣, I already installed Windows 98 in a VM, created snapshots and whatsoever, but with my little knowledge I prefer DOSBox/source ports instead of launching a VM, if all it takes to launch a game either way are some mouse clicks.

The only thing that I want to "experience" that is different from DOSBox/source ports is a real build, that's it, and I'm trying to find a good balance between compatibility, "recently manufactured parts" and money since I don't have many hardware source (both retro and new) around here (zero).

Anyway I just ordered the cooler and the PSU from Amazon, I just want to see if these things POST before else.

Deleted Off Topic post. Nothing to see here.

I have yet to find a virtual machine software that can do windows 98 with 3d hardware video and audio acceleration. Win98 VM not so ultimate if it can only play games with software renderer and basic or no audio

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-10-31, 19:15:

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-31, 18:49:

windows 98 was good enough with 32gb disk back in the day but a multitude of 128gb partitons one best disable recycle bins on each one.

So basically if I buy a SATA SSD/HDD over 128 GB I have to put SATA in "legacy mode", partition the drive (with something like Partition Magic on Win10 or a patched fdisk) making a 2GB primary partition, run Windows 98 setup, let it format the partition to FAT32, install it, patch it, put SATA back in "normal mode" and make FAT32 partitions for the rest of the drive?

Did I get that correctly?

legacy mode works on non AHCI disks which are generally under 3tb in size.
Large capacity patch stops data corruption beyond 128gb partition sizes.
AHCI patch and large capacity patch together for say a 6tb in 3tb fat32 partitons or more overall disk capacity. (for when somehow everything smaller vanishes who really worries)
run the way you want. if its128gb partitions you have a whole alphabet to fill with them excluding A and B still 24x128gb = 3TB disk 🤣 see how engineers set boundaries A and B without floppies can be set for optical or even hard disk in OS.

I just put a 250gb seagate into windows 10 used this tool to make a 250gb formatted fat32 partition . https://www.diskpart.com/articles/format-2tb- … fat32-7201.html

Then I put the disk into my pentium 4 motherboards controller booted up with a bootable windows 98se cdrom.
I ran install until it shutdown ready for first run.
I replaced the w98se optical disk with a bootable windows 98se DOS cdrom (can use a floppy) with large capacity patch in a folder.
I run the patch then reboot with windows 98se cdrom inserted again.
Setup completes and after login file explorer reports 250gb c: drive.

I also have a bootable PATA 500gb disk already running windows millennium on a single fat32 partition I always use the largest wasteful cluster size because i know i got plenty to waste therefore it really runs faster.
For PQ partition manager makes 128gb partitions still I recommend 120gb as 128gb is at the boundary and sometimes causes geometry errors.
If there is free space just make as many partitons to make them allocated and useful.

The 1 disk 1 partiton no fuss the 120gb method i recommend disabling recycle bins as 1 recycle command causes the whole disk surface to get scanned for each recycle bin attribute time and date stamped on as many drive letters as your overall capacity offers. (well, it becomes noticeable with 2tb divided into 120gb partitons i tried that)

10 for price of 1? anyone?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/234231121804?hash=it … O4AAOSwhdVhZKyd

new disks are out there too but these are pretty good however, generally full size desktop drives are very quiet to run these days notebook disks for desktops if you really have no screws and your tower trembles to the PSU fan 🤣

Zapbuzz thanks for your detailed instructions.

One question, isn’t scandisk or defrag slow with a one partition of 250 GB?

That’s a great price for HDDs, it’s a shame that it doesn’t ship to Italy.

I see that you definitely prefer 2.5” drives instead of 3.5” ones.

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-11-01, 00:28:

Zapbuzz thanks for your detailed instructions.

One question, isn’t scandisk or defrag slow with a one partition of 250 GB?

That’s a great price for HDDs, it’s a shame that it doesn’t ship to Italy.

yes, there are 3rd party free altrnatives to replace scandisk and defrag but it would take a ton of time filling up a disk to slow microsoft defrag!

recommend try search 10 x sata hdd in your ebay you might be lucky to find someone

chkdsk is recommended for massive disks on windows 98se than scandisk by microsoft engineers. (of that era)
I have run scandisk millennium edition on my 500gb hard disk the time taken is tollerable.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-11-01, 00:30:

yes, there are 3rd party free altrnatives to replace scandisk and defrag but it would take a ton of time filling up a disk to slow microsoft defrag!

And you can replace even the scandisk that comes up automatically when Windows 98 has not been shutdown properly?

I saw in various guides that it’s recommended to change Windows 98 defrag with the ME one.