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Dell Dimension 4600 success - and a question

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First post, by dartredtail

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I recently bought a Dell Dimension 4600. I installed an IDE drive and disabled SATA. Ran the 98se installer off a CD with the setup.exe /a i command (to disable ACPI which solves an IRQ conflict permanently.) Amazingly, EVERYTHING works. There are drivers for every device for this beast, and windows 98 loves it.

Nvidia 5200 FX AGP
SB-LIVE
USB 2.0 NEC PCI card

Here's the cool part - via nusb36.exe - the USB 2.0 card functions at USB 2.0 speeds. I figured I could plop a huge external drive on there and hold all my .iso files that way.

Turns out I can! but my external drive is real slow, and some games hiccup for a moment as it seeks.

The enclosure is internally SATA - here's my sort of crazy question... could I plop a 1TB SSD in there and have no real issues? The internal controller is doing the SATA connection, win98 just sees "USB storage device." With the standard spinning laptop drive in there (2tb) it has no issue seeing all the space and works with FAT32 formatted via AOMEI partitioner.

I know about TRIM and all that - but this drive would literally just hold pre-installed games and ISOs for use with Daemon Tools. Anyone have experience with this?

Reply 1 of 3, by cyclone3d

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On that computer, make sure the shrouded CPU fan is actually exhausting air out the back of the case. Dell had a mfg issue where a ton of those Dimension 4600 had the fan installed backwards which lead to overheating and hardware failures.

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Reply 2 of 3, by dartredtail

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cyclone3d wrote on 2021-12-26, 14:22:

On that computer, make sure the shrouded CPU fan is actually exhausting air out the back of the case. Dell had a mfg issue where a ton of those Dimension 4600 had the fan installed backwards which lead to overheating and hardware failures.

Yes, I double-checked, thankfully this one is a good egg. I just wonder about this external SSD thing and TRIM. I'll be MOSTLY *reading* isos, not writing data. Do you think I'll run into any issues? In my initial tests, the read speed is incredible, and even more importantly there's no seek-delay like in a 5400rpm spinning drive, no spin-up time. Games run well. I just guess I worry about the "long run."

Reply 3 of 3, by dartredtail

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Update:

I have received an IDE->SD chip from Amazon for this machine. Windows 98se install went smoothly. It did complain about the size of the disk being reported incorrectly, but then after Scandisk / format, it recognized all 128GB (111 usable.) I used an ONN brand 128GB card for the OS. Boot time is VERY fast. I then installed the chipset drivers, then removed USB hubs from the device manager and installed NUSB36.exe, rebooted. Both drives were formatted on a different PC as "MBR/FAT32" (with AOMEI partition assistant.) Plugged them both into USB, and voila! 998GB free on each 1TB external USB 2.0 SSDs. Windows 98 has no issue copying data to/from either, and DAEMON Tools allows me to mount ISOs from them and run games off of them with extreme speed.

I went into device manager and set the drives as "removeable storage," which allowed me to then set the drive letters manually, so games install/load properly, since the devices will always be in the original drive letter they were at install time.

If anyone needs specifics about the USB 2.0 card, the drives used, or drivers, let me know! This finally solves my win98 dream machine setup.

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