Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-25, 04:59:

Interesting! I hadn't thought of that. I've never really done anything with SCSI drives or controllers, though I have in recent […]
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dionb wrote on 2025-11-24, 20:25:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-23, 02:26:

[...]

The only other thing that stood out to me is the one 8bit ISA card is marked "Floptical", but I think it might just be SCSI... which is, again, not worth a lot or hard to find.

It looks like it has a bootROM. 8b bootable SCSI cards seem very sought-after. I was looking for one a while ago and couldn't find anything under EUR 150. So I got a Future Domain non-bootable controller and added the ROM myself 😉

If that card is bootable and particularly if it also supports large drives, it could be something of a unicorn. I can't make any of that out though from the pic.

Interesting! I hadn't thought of that. I've never really done anything with SCSI drives or controllers, though I have in recent years accumulated some of both... I don't know if there are any 8bit SCSI cards with a ROM though.

Two questions though...

First, how did you add a ROM to one that didn't have one? Did it already have a location or a socket for a ROM, or did you have to add one in a more "creative" way? 😁
Nevermind! I found your thread here! Nice work! 😁

Second, what are the benefits of going with SCSI vs going with IDE on a retro PC these days? If you have SCSI drives on hand and want to use them that's understandable, but it seems that SCSI poses some challenges and limitations... mainly that it's so difficult and expensive to get modern solid-state replacements for SCSI devices. Where as IDE controllers can often be hooked up to either a CF card on a simple adapter or a SD card on a more complex (possibly finicky) adapter.

I have hung onto a bunch of SCSI stuff in case I ever ended up needing it, but so far I've always been able to go IDE for anything I've worked on. I'm curious to know what the benefits are these days.

SCSI was created as a high-performance data bus. During its time, it was superior to the other hard drive interfaces because it had faster data transfer speeds. With SCSI, it was designed to be able to connect multiple devices to it, as long as it was properly terminated.

s0s wrote on 2025-11-25, 14:42:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-25, 04:59:

Interesting! I hadn't thought of that. I've never really done anything with SCSI drives or controllers, though I have in recent […]
Show full quote

dionb wrote on 2025-11-24, 20:25:

It looks like it has a bootROM. 8b bootable SCSI cards seem very sought-after. I was looking for one a while ago and couldn't find anything under EUR 150. So I got a Future Domain non-bootable controller and added the ROM myself 😉

If that card is bootable and particularly if it also supports large drives, it could be something of a unicorn. I can't make any of that out though from the pic.

Interesting! I hadn't thought of that. I've never really done anything with SCSI drives or controllers, though I have in recent years accumulated some of both... I don't know if there are any 8bit SCSI cards with a ROM though.

Two questions though...

First, how did you add a ROM to one that didn't have one? Did it already have a location or a socket for a ROM, or did you have to add one in a more "creative" way? 😁
Nevermind! I found your thread here! Nice work! 😁

Second, what are the benefits of going with SCSI vs going with IDE on a retro PC these days? If you have SCSI drives on hand and want to use them that's understandable, but it seems that SCSI poses some challenges and limitations... mainly that it's so difficult and expensive to get modern solid-state replacements for SCSI devices. Where as IDE controllers can often be hooked up to either a CF card on a simple adapter or a SD card on a more complex (possibly finicky) adapter.

I have hung onto a bunch of SCSI stuff in case I ever ended up needing it, but so far I've always been able to go IDE for anything I've worked on. I'm curious to know what the benefits are these days.

SCSI was created as a high-performance data bus. During its time, it was superior to the other hard drive interfaces because it had faster data transfer speeds. With SCSI, it was designed to be able to connect multiple devices to it, as long as it was properly terminated.

Of course, those were the benefits back then, but today we have a lot more options for cards to drop into an ISA slot and solid state devices will offer a lot more performance even on a slower interface. I was just curious as to what the benefits are for retro computing these days, compared to other options. Doing it for period correctness and just wanting to use SCSI is, of course, totally acceptable. 🙂

PD2JK wrote on 2025-11-25, 14:19:

Alright, it's in! The similarities with the Trident 9850 card are certainly there, but indeed, that heatsink.... […]
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Alright, it's in! The similarities with the Trident 9850 card are certainly there, but indeed, that heatsink....

The attachment 20251125_150925780.JPG is no longer available

The attachment 20251125_150938630.JPG is no longer available

And now some redeeming words.

The attachment 20251125_151420290.JPG is no longer available

Put away the gun, dion_b's head is safe.

Edit:
The Permedia BIOS string got me on the wrong foot. I really thought it was a Permedia 1. GLINT/Permedia drivers didn't want to install.

So I tried the Permedia 2 driver. Newsflash: it's a Permedia 2 with 4MB memory.

"Enhanced" means "2" ?

3DMark99 looks interdasting, no surprises.

The attachment 20251125_165200013.JPG is no longer available

VGA output quality is great, one would expect from a workstation class card. Happy with it.

Mystery solved! That is interesting that the BIOS doesn't actually specify that it is a Permedia 2. Also, it's odd that it just uses a generic BIOS and seemingly has no branding on the card itself. The Permedia 2 was fairly prolific but was mostly found on clearly named cards from well known brands... Diamond, Creative, ELSA and Accelgraphics (not as well known now but were common in workstations back in the day). Googling it, I see that ExperColor, Innovision and Hercules also made them. An unbranded Permedia 2 card is definitely an interesting find! Especially with that funky memory configuration.

After typing that I was able to find this page for a Joytech Apollo 3000, which looks nothing like yours but is mostly unbranded (aside from FCC ID) and lists a similar generic 1.38 BIOS from the same date.

Also, for future reference, it looks like every Permedia 1 card has a large external (usually TI) RAMDAC, so that would be a way to distinguish between the 1 and 2.

PD2JK wrote on 2025-11-25, 14:19:

[...]

Put away the gun, dion_b's head is safe.

😜

Nice card. I suspect it's quite a late one. Early Permedia 2 cards were aimed at pretty high-end prosumer market, straddling professional 3D and gaming. Unfortunately for 3Dlabs it succeeded in neither, with the pro world thinking it a toy and the gamers considering it too slow too expensive. So it didn't sell well which left 3Dlabs with big surplus stock that they started to dump at low prices, iirc in late 1998 and 1999 and we're picked up by all the usual Taiwanese bottom-feeders.

Got a new toy myself:

A 3Com Audrey internet appliance. Huge commercial flop for 3Com, but I actually have an application for it- kitchen MP3 player (my youngest son stole the Google Nest my So had placed there. I hated it's voice control but missed the music - the couple of time it actually understood what I was asking it to play). It's powerful enough to do MP3 playback and some OS images for it support an NFS client. Unfortunately I just discovered this one doesn't so need to either find a package or - more likely - install a more suitable image.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-25, 04:59:

I have hung onto a bunch of SCSI stuff in case I ever ended up needing it, but so far I've always been able to go IDE for anything I've worked on. I'm curious to know what the benefits are these days.

I believe all Macs released prior to 1995, and some afterwards, use SCSI for their HDDs and Optical drives, so there's that.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Of course, those were the benefits back then, but today we have a lot more options for cards to drop into an ISA slot and solid state devices will offer a lot more performance even on a slower interface. I was just curious as to what the benefits are for retro computing these days, compared to other options. Doing it for period correctness and just wanting to use SCSI is, of course, totally acceptable. 🙂

Well, I bumped into a not completely unusual situation with Pentium morherboard where cdrom didn’t get recognized in the second IDE channel as master and only device. Of course using separate channels for HDD and CDROM is always preferable, this wasn’t an optimal situation although hardly a disaster either.

As I had some SCSI gear, I installed Adaptec PCI controller and SCSI CDROM to go around this issue.

Another benefits you can get with SCSI is bootable optical media to older systems lacking that capability. You can also go around the BIOS IDE HDD size limitations.

So there is definitely places where SCSI has benefits over other options.

devius wrote on 2025-11-25, 22:12:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-25, 04:59:

I have hung onto a bunch of SCSI stuff in case I ever ended up needing it, but so far I've always been able to go IDE for anything I've worked on. I'm curious to know what the benefits are these days.

I believe all Macs released prior to 1995, and some afterwards, use SCSI for their HDDs and Optical drives, so there's that.

Yeah, if you're working with computers that have to use SCSI then that's your only choice. I was talking mainly about systems with ISA\VLB\PCI slots which could presumably use any drive interface that can be added with an ISA\VLB\PCI card.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2025-11-26, 05:14:

Well, I bumped into a not completely unusual situation with Pentium morherboard where cdrom didn’t get recognized in the second […]
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Ozzuneoj wrote:

Of course, those were the benefits back then, but today we have a lot more options for cards to drop into an ISA slot and solid state devices will offer a lot more performance even on a slower interface. I was just curious as to what the benefits are for retro computing these days, compared to other options. Doing it for period correctness and just wanting to use SCSI is, of course, totally acceptable. 🙂

Well, I bumped into a not completely unusual situation with Pentium morherboard where cdrom didn’t get recognized in the second IDE channel as master and only device. Of course using separate channels for HDD and CDROM is always preferable, this wasn’t an optimal situation although hardly a disaster either.

As I had some SCSI gear, I installed Adaptec PCI controller and SCSI CDROM to go around this issue.

Another benefits you can get with SCSI is bootable optical media to older systems lacking that capability. You can also go around the BIOS IDE HDD size limitations.

So there is definitely places where SCSI has benefits over other options.

Of course, if you've got an SCSI card and a SCSI CD-ROM and you need a some kind of card + CD-ROM, why not use those? 🙂

As far as booting from CD-ROM and getting around HDD limitations, I know that having a card with a separate EIDE BIOS will at least get around the second one... I honestly have never thought about booting from a CD-ROM in a system older than the late 90s though! I'm not sure if any ISA or VLB IDE controllers can do that, regardless of BIOS, though I'm sure if it's possible someone will chime in. 😁

If being able to boot from a CD-ROM is more common with SCSI controllers (ISA, VLB or PCI), then that's certainly a notable feature!

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-26, 05:36:

Of course, if you've got an SCSI card and a SCSI CD-ROM and you need a some kind of card + CD-ROM, why not use those? 🙂

As far as booting from CD-ROM and getting around HDD limitations, I know that having a card with a separate EIDE BIOS will at least get around the second one... I honestly have never thought about booting from a CD-ROM in a system older than the late 90s though! I'm not sure if any ISA or VLB IDE controllers can do that, regardless of BIOS, though I'm sure if it's possible someone will chime in. 😁

If being able to boot from a CD-ROM is more common with SCSI controllers (ISA, VLB or PCI), then that's certainly a notable feature!

I haven't bumped into any ISA or VLB IO controller that would have bootrom or even slot for one. I'm not saying those don't exist, but they are extremely rare. Not all SCSI controllers have bootrom either, but those that are mainly designed for mass storage use usually have and they are common.

Of course you can use XTIDE bios in NIC bootrom slot or romcard to go around the size limitations for IDE HDDs. However, this will require another card, programmer and eprom chip. SCSI is out of the box solution and in that sense, quite an elegant one.

With bootable CDROM you can use for example bootable win98SE install media for a machine that can't otherwise use it, so the use case is pretty much the same as with newer machines: installing OS. Other than that, there is not much other use for the feature.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2025-11-26, 06:56:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-26, 05:36:

Of course, if you've got an SCSI card and a SCSI CD-ROM and you need a some kind of card + CD-ROM, why not use those? 🙂

As far as booting from CD-ROM and getting around HDD limitations, I know that having a card with a separate EIDE BIOS will at least get around the second one... I honestly have never thought about booting from a CD-ROM in a system older than the late 90s though! I'm not sure if any ISA or VLB IDE controllers can do that, regardless of BIOS, though I'm sure if it's possible someone will chime in. 😁

If being able to boot from a CD-ROM is more common with SCSI controllers (ISA, VLB or PCI), then that's certainly a notable feature!

I haven't bumped into any ISA or VLB IO controller that would have bootrom or even slot for one. I'm not saying those don't exist, but they are extremely rare. Not all SCSI controllers have bootrom either, but those that are mainly designed for mass storage use usually have and they are common.

Hmm... maybe I'm not thinking of the same thing, but I have come across several EIDE cards (ISA and VLB) over the years that have a BIOS ROM. Promise and sometimes SIIG cards with ROMs aren't going to be in every assorted lot of old PC parts but they are fairly easy to find here. Searching for EIDE, or enhanced IDE on ebay tends to come up with at least a couple dozen results for IDE cards that have a BIOS onboard. The best ones tend to be more expensive and less common, but they aren't super hard to find either.

Again, I could be misunderstanding what you mean. I honestly don't have anywhere near as much experience with pre-1997 stuff as many others do here.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2025-11-26, 06:56:

Of course you can use XTIDE bios in NIC bootrom slot or romcard to go around the size limitations for IDE HDDs. However, this will require another card, programmer and eprom chip. SCSI is out of the box solution and in that sense, quite an elegant one.

I guess it depends what you have on hand and what you want to use. If you have working SCSI drives, cables and controllers on hand then that would definitely be a good option. But if you have to buy something or are wanting to use solid state storage for much better responsiveness, then buying a premade XT-IDE card will only cost somewhere around $50-$70 US and can be used with much more common drives. Some have built in CF or even SD card slots so you can just put a card directly into it and you're all set.

So again, it just matters what you have on hand, what your performance\feature goals are and possibly what you're used to.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2025-11-26, 06:56:

With bootable CDROM you can use for example bootable win98SE install media for a machine that can't otherwise use it, so the use case is pretty much the same as with newer machines: installing OS. Other than that, there is not much other use for the feature.

Yeah, booting from the CD to install Windows 9x was basically the only thing I had come up with as well, and even then it is often a good idea to just use a boot floppy that has the updated version of fdisk to avoid any bugs with the older ones. It's honestly kind of funny thinking about how huge of a deal CD booting seemed in the early 2000s when I was first getting deep into this stuff. In reality, the span of time from when most motherboards couldn't boot from CD (only floppy\HDD) to when they could already boot from USB drives was, what... maybe 6 years? It took me quite a while to move to doing OS installs from a flash drive though... probably 2010-2012. But I digress...

All this SCSI talk has me wanting to bust out my "SCSI" box to see what it's all about.

For one, I have a HUUUGE ~20GB full height SCSI drive I inherited from a toy company that left it in their attic with a bunch of old computer equipment when they shut down (data security... 🤣). I think it is one of these. It may not work, but I've always been curious to know what was on it. Probably old artwork or design prototypes or something. 😀

... also, if it doesn't work I can finally get rid of it. I don't mind keeping a little conversation piece here and there, but the thing is massive and I could use that space for something else!

It was mentioned in another thread "This whole hobby is an exercise in impracticality to the Nth degree..." and in addition to period correctness and some of the benefits above, I think the "impracticality" is another appeal of using SCSI in a machine that doesn't necessarily demand or need it. There's something oddly satisfying about using an enterprise-grade SCSI controller intended to link a chain of devices but for just one optical or hard drive, wrangling termination and IDs, having to navigate between Centronics and HD50 and Ultra SCSI, adding more time to boot with another BIOS, etc. just to do something there are now more simpler ways to accomplish hehe.

SCSI is superior to IDE in every tangible metric. I really like it on old ISA systems because I can free up IRQ 14 for a network card, and that glosses over the performance boost you get with DMA. When you free up the CPU to do CPU things while the hard drives does its spinning rust things, you get a decent boost. You aren't going to get more FPS in DOOM, but loading will be a bit quicker between maps. Windows will move a bit quicker. (even more with a blue/zulu scsi replacement)

I will use SCSI whenever I can.

however... Once you get to pentium/pci era. SATA all the way. It can be a bit of a hassle with compatibility and drivers, but the advantage of being able to swap the hard drive out with for a $20 SSD and easily move files to new systems... SCSI just loses all appeal for me.

luckybob wrote on 2025-11-26, 17:55:

SCSI is superior to IDE in every tangible metric. I really like it on old ISA systems because I can free up IRQ 14 for a network card, and that glosses over the performance boost you get with DMA. When you free up the CPU to do CPU things while the hard drives does its spinning rust things, you get a decent boost. You aren't going to get more FPS in DOOM, but loading will be a bit quicker between maps. Windows will move a bit quicker. (even more with a blue/zulu scsi replacement)

I will use SCSI whenever I can.

however... Once you get to pentium/pci era. SATA all the way. It can be a bit of a hassle with compatibility and drivers, but the advantage of being able to swap the hard drive out with for a $20 SSD and easily move files to new systems... SCSI just loses all appeal for me.

ISA: Forgive me, I’m not very wise on ISA era kit - If the ISA era mainboard has IDE (I assume PATA) then why not use a PATA to SATA adapter and put an SSD on the end of that?

PCI: My kit includes a PCI RAID controller with 4x SATA ports and 64Mb cache. I don’t feel this is a good approach. First, one SSD can fully saturate the PCI bus so RAID0 is pointless - and I could instead have used a PATA-SATA adapter, fully saturated the IDE bus with a single SSD, and leave the PCI bus completely free for other things.

The only class of edge cases I can think of is where you want to run mechanical drives, but is there ever an application that needs those?

momaka wrote on 2025-11-16, 16:46:

sunkindly wrote on 2025-11-16, 02:20:

I don't know much about PSUs so don't know what's wrong with it but either way I don't like it at all and there's no return policy so now I'm stuck with a glorified weight.

Well, if there's a "no return" policy, consider this an opportunity to learn something about PSUs. 😉
Unplug it, take the top off, and post some picture in a new thread (or here) and let's see what's inside. That way, if it turns out to be a total POS, others will be able to see why.

I finally got a chance to open it up:

In my ignorance I don't see anything obviously wrong. The exposed wire ends don't seem ideal though?

MattRocks wrote on 2025-11-26, 18:34:

ISA: Forgive me, I’m not very wise on ISA era kit - If the ISA era mainboard has IDE (I assume PATA) then why not use a PATA to SATA adapter and put an SSD on the end of that?

PCI: My kit includes a PCI RAID controller with 4x SATA ports and 64Mb cache. I don’t feel this is a good approach. First, one SSD can fully saturate the PCI bus so RAID0 is pointless - and I could instead have used a PATA-SATA adapter, fully saturated the IDE bus with a single SSD, and leave the PCI bus completely free for other things.

because 99% of IDE<>SATA adapters are ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY terrible. if you look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HWBmbb0YNY (specifically @ the 13min mark) Brand new drive, brand new adapter, didn't work right. All you need is the adapter to fail ONCE during a write to a critical area, and you're re-installing the game/windows.

NOPE. Not gonna deal with that.

/SOME/ old adapters work properly. But you're likely to spend $50 on one, and at that point you might as well drop in a Promise TX4 sata card. (they have good 9X, 2K, & XP drivers)

I also want to add, the cheap SCSI drive adapters are just as evil. you should avoid 68<>50 pin adapters whenever humanly possible. you cant get away with cheap 68pin<>SCA adapters, and its usually not a problem. USUALLY.

also also:
you get large drive support with the TX4 pci card. I had zero issue with huge drives on win 9x and XP. And that is also a benefit of SCSI cards in ISA machines too. 😀

luckybob wrote on 2025-11-26, 18:52:

if you look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HWBmbb0YNY (specifically @ the 13min mark) Brand new drive, brand new adapter, didn't work right.

Crysis is after my time, but my understanding is that Crysis is a bit of a resource pig - and Windows XP doesn't know what an SSD is.

So, like a fish on dry land, that Kingston SSD performed as badly as I think it should have. You see neither Windows XP nor the IDE controller support SSD TRIM commands. My view is that TRIM is critical to new consumer SSDs because the TRIM command tells the SSD which blocks have been deleted. Without the TRIM command, the SSD is preserving blocks the OS thinks have been deleted and the SSD thinks have not been deleted. That setup is going to create one big mess, and very quickly if the OS is using virtual memory for a resource pig like Crysis. My view is that Crysis should hit a 0.0 FPS brick wall when the OS thinks there is new space for virtual memory and the SSD thinks there is no space left.

What Jayz could have done with his Crysis rig is use the SSD for read-only tasks (there are a lot disc assets in games) with OS temp files and OS swap file on a HDD. Or, stick to games that fit in RAM and need no swap file.

But to your other point, were you implying SATA PCI controllers work with WinXP? Or, you view SCSI as the only viable upgrade from PATA?

luckybob wrote on 2025-11-26, 17:55:

[...]

however... Once you get to pentium/pci era. SATA all the way. It can be a bit of a hassle with compatibility and drivers, but the advantage of being able to swap the hard drive out with for a $20 SSD and easily move files to new systems... SCSI just loses all appeal for me.

Heresy!

I was utterly blown away by my dual P3-933 system with AHA-29160 adapter and two Quantum Atlas IV in RAID-0. Most responsive XP system I've ever had. Probably could get better with (good) SSD on a good Promise controller, but as-is it's just amazing. Also those Atlas IV are actually quiet, unlike the monster SCSI drive in my XT...

MattRocks wrote on 2025-11-26, 22:45:

Crysis is after my time, but my understanding is that Crysis is a bit of a resource pig - and Windows XP doesn't know what an SS […]
Show full quote

luckybob wrote on 2025-11-26, 18:52:

if you look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HWBmbb0YNY (specifically @ the 13min mark) Brand new drive, brand new adapter, didn't work right.

Crysis is after my time, but my understanding is that Crysis is a bit of a resource pig - and Windows XP doesn't know what an SSD is.

So, like a fish on dry land, that Kingston SSD performed as badly as I think it should have. You see neither Windows XP nor the IDE controller support SSD TRIM commands. My view is that TRIM is critical to new consumer SSDs because the TRIM command tells the SSD which blocks have been deleted. Without the TRIM command, the SSD is preserving blocks the OS thinks have been deleted and the SSD thinks have not been deleted. That setup is going to create one big mess, and very quickly if the OS is using virtual memory for a resource pig like Crysis. My view is that Crysis should hit a 0.0 FPS brick wall when the OS thinks there is new space for virtual memory and the SSD thinks there is no space left.

What Jayz could have done with his Crysis rig is use the SSD for read-only tasks (there are a lot disc assets in games) with OS temp files and OS swap file on a HDD. Or, stick to games that fit in RAM and need no swap file.

But to your other point, you implied that new Kingston SSDs power Crysis on PCI adapters with WinXP? I'd be interested in seeing that because I don't think they should.

I have been using Windows 98SE and Windows XP test benches with solid state drives for several years and they always run fine. I have a 16GB mini-SATA SSD (from a Chromebook) running through multiple adapters hooked up to a 440BX board in my 98SE test rig and it has something like 20 Windows folders on it (I boot to DOS and rename the Windows folder I want for testing a certain piece of hardware... saves a huge amount of time dealing with drivers), and has been operating nearly full for 4-5 years with no noticeable performance problems.

My XP test system is an nForce 2 with SATA using an old 64GB Crucial C300 from ~2010, and it has tons of games and demos on it, is constantly being loaded up with various GPU driver packages and having things reinstalled... it works flawlessly, and the drive has been in the system for at least 5 years.

For retro systems, TRIM is nowhere near the big deal that people make it out to be and it probably isn't going to be an issue unless you are daily driving the system for an extended period of time and expecting it to handle thousands of writes\deletes from cache\temp files, application reinstalls, etc. without any performance impact. To be fair, though... I have never seen SSD performance degrade noticeably over time on a retro system or a modern one.

These SSDs I've been using are relatively old, but newer ones should be even better at handling a lack of TRIM because they have more sophisticated internal garbage collection... at least that's what I've read online. I'm not going to claim to be an expert on the subject. Personally, I've never had an issue with any SSD.

Regarding the video... I'm not sure exactly what we're supposed to be looking for there. The system was acting weird with the 1TB SATA drive on the adapter, but he was able to format it through Disk Management... and honestly, he could have deleted and remade the partition and left that part out. He then successfully installed an 18GB game to it, seemingly without issues. The game was running HORRIBLE because he was running with a below spec CPU from 2001, with minimum spec RAM with the OS installed on a positively ANCIENT 20GB IDE hard drive. Due to the lack of RAM the game would have been constantly swapping to virtual memory using an IDE hard drive from probably ~2001... it doesn't matter that the game was on the SSD.

If he would have just installed the OS and everything else to the SSD, assuming the adapter wasn't garbage, the system likely would have worked far better. The game would still run like trash, but I'd bet that it would have been playable with virtual memory swapping to an SSD. Trying to play through the whole game like that would probably not go well, but it'd be better than waiting for the hard drive to swap at a few dozen MB\sec with ton of latency.

Sadly, this isn't real surprising from JayZTwoCents though. I had to stop watching his videos a couple years ago because he frequently makes factual errors, leaves out important details and then when problems are encountered a lot of times his explanations\assumptions about the cause are inaccurate. A big part of it is probably just being too busy with other things to worry about accuracy in a one-off video, and another part is probably an effort to dumb down the video to be more accessible. He and LTT both do this at times, especially when referring to old hardware. GamersNexus doesn't do this, and I appreciate how accurate their comments are about old hardware when it does come up... I just wish they could make a video these days without it being laced with expletives.

EDIT: Also, this is getting waaay OT for the thread. Sorry for dragging it on...

MattRocks wrote on 2025-11-26, 22:45:

Crysis is after my time, but my understanding is that Crysis is a bit of a resource pig - and Windows XP doesn't know what an SS […]
Show full quote

luckybob wrote on 2025-11-26, 18:52:

if you look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HWBmbb0YNY (specifically @ the 13min mark) Brand new drive, brand new adapter, didn't work right.

Crysis is after my time, but my understanding is that Crysis is a bit of a resource pig - and Windows XP doesn't know what an SSD is.

So, like a fish on dry land, that Kingston SSD performed as badly as I think it should have. You see neither Windows XP nor the IDE controller support SSD TRIM commands. My view is that TRIM is critical to new consumer SSDs because the TRIM command tells the SSD which blocks have been deleted. Without the TRIM command, the SSD is preserving blocks the OS thinks have been deleted and the SSD thinks have not been deleted. That setup is going to create one big mess, and very quickly if the OS is using virtual memory for a resource pig like Crysis. My view is that Crysis should hit a 0.0 FPS brick wall when the OS thinks there is new space for virtual memory and the SSD thinks there is no space left.

What Jayz could have done with his Crysis rig is use the SSD for read-only tasks (there are a lot disc assets in games) with OS temp files and OS swap file on a HDD. Or, stick to games that fit in RAM and need no swap file.

But to your other point, were you implying SATA PCI controllers work with WinXP? Or, you view SCSI as the only viable upgrade from PATA?

That's not how it works at all

Most / all new SSDs have built -in garbage collection. You will just hit a point when the drive itself is forced to clean up unused blocks if Trim is not supported in the OS. Performance of the SSD will go down for a bit but it won't come to a screeching halt.

devius wrote on 2025-11-25, 22:12:

I believe all Macs released prior to 1995, and some afterwards, use SCSI for their HDDs and Optical drives, so there's that.

The Apple SCSI HDs from the '90s seem to be extremely fragile and temperamental nowadays. All of mine went bad. I had to order a 160 MB one for my LC III earlier this year. My Power Macintosh 7200/75 was designed for SCSI, also. But because at the time I got it, I had several spare high-capacity IDE hard drives, so I ordered a Sonnet Tempo Trio PCI card, which gave me two IDE slots, two USB jacks, and two IEEE 1394 Firewire jacks. I've ran it that way ever since. Along with my Sonnet Crescendo G3, which is a PCI 400 MHz G3 processor accelerator card. I also have a Performa 5200CD, which uses IDE.

The LC III was from 1993, the Power Macintosh 7200/75 was from 1995, and the Performa 5200CD was also from 1995.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-26, 05:36:

I honestly have never thought about booting from a CD-ROM in a system older than the late 90s though! I'm not sure if any ISA or VLB IDE controllers can do that, regardless of BIOS, though I'm sure if it's possible someone will chime in. 😁

My first computer was a used computer from 1995. It was designed for Windows 95. When I got it, I had to add a CD-ROM, modem, and sound card in order for it to be useful. It was able to boot from CDs. In fact, Windows 95 was offered on CD-ROM, in addition to the 23 floppy disk install set that I had two of. The motherboard had both ISA and PCI slots.

s0s wrote on 2025-11-27, 07:14:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-26, 05:36:

I honestly have never thought about booting from a CD-ROM in a system older than the late 90s though! I'm not sure if any ISA or VLB IDE controllers can do that, regardless of BIOS, though I'm sure if it's possible someone will chime in. 😁

My first computer was a used computer from 1995. It was designed for Windows 95. When I got it, I had to add a CD-ROM, modem, and sound card in order for it to be useful. It was able to boot from CDs. In fact, Windows 95 was offered on CD-ROM, in addition to the 23 floppy disk install set that I had two of. The motherboard had both ISA and PCI slots.

I guess it's possible that your PC could do that, but I don't think there were too many motherboards that had built in support for booting from a CD-ROM in 1995, because there was no standard for doing that yet. The original CD version of Windows 95 (OEM only, I believe) wasn't bootable and sometimes shipped with a boot floppy so you could boot to DOS from the floppy, enable CD-ROM support to access the Windows 95 CD and then run the installer. Or, you would boot to your existing DOS and install it that way, or use your own DOS boot floppy and choose to enable CD-ROM support. That's how most PCs worked until probably 1997-ish, with the earliest boot-from-CD options probably showing up in late 1996.

I had to fact check myself and... yeah. Booting from CD prior to 1997 would be quite uncommon:
Re: My original Windows95 CD boot disk doesn't boot CDs?
https://archive.org/details/win95-27722
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/com … omment/mt8gpzw/

Also found a post from 2004 where someone suggested using Nero to add a bootable floppy image to a burned copy of the Windows 95 CD to make it bootable... because it could not do it on its own.