I don't know anything about VIA SATA controllers but if you had bought a Silicon Image chipset, you could have flashed it to a non-raid bios. Then it would simple "work" without drivers.

I don't see any reason it shouldn't. I know for a fact that SATA drivers work just fine if you set them up properly, Markk has one working on this P3 1000 using an external SATA controller (which contains its own BIOS for booting).
Keep us posted!

I ran a Vertex 2 with 98SE and DOS. I had the Vertex 2 attached to a Promise SATA150 TX2 card. It was fine.

However it is really tricky to align a FAT32 partition for the SSD and also have it DOS boot compatible. I used Linux to do it but I don't remember how anymore. It wasn't entirely reliable either. It might be best just to not bother with alignment.

Another super speedy option that's still quiet, way cheaper for the capacity, and doesn't need alignment is a Seagate Momentus XT.

I bought the cheap SATA controller on Ebay since I need to test if the Compaq will take it with a regular SATA or IDE harddrive . That BIOS/motherboard lives it own life at times and I don't know if it will be bootable or not. If it does not work I'm sure the Super socket 7 machine will take it 😀

Swaaye: Buying that drive is overkill for my usage and too expensive. I just want to get rid of the noisy IDE drives I have in these two machines, and when I do this upgrade on my modern rig I'll get two 32gb SSD's in surplus. So hopefully these can get another life, as 32GB in a retro machine is plentiful for a Win98/DOS machine.

However it is really tricky to align a FAT32 partition for the SSD and also have it DOS boot compatible.

I use 32GB SSD for my retro storage and I have not experienced any boot problems. However, I have noticed that some disk firmwares don't play nice with LBA addressing under DOS (whereas they work fine under Windows). I use Transcend 32GB SSDs and for two identical drives with different firmware, one addresses beyond 8GB fine in DOS whereas the other does not.

The best solution I came up with was to use a partition manager which could format to FAT32+ instead of FAT32. This solved the addressing problem in DOS, despite the aforementioned firmware issue. Partition Magic 8 can do this.

By "align the partition" I mean a partition offset that aligns the start of the partition with the SSD erase block size. This somewhat improves flash write performance and longevity by preventing more block erasures than necessary.

For ex
http://blog.nuclex-games.com/2009/12/aligning … n-ssd-on-linux/

But DOS has some requirements about how a partition is setup or it won't boot. Fdisk has a DOS compatibility mode. I had it aligned partition working at one point but I don't remember how I did it anymore.

However I really don't know how much effort this is worth.... We're not going to be writing 10s of gigs per day here.

I did a review on a SATA<>IDE adapter a while ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpR-tiiVdUY

I believe the performance is sufficient to be used for a project like yours.

In general I also recommend a 200+ SSD these days. Prices have come down quite a bit. What is crucial though is having a platter drive for your media, downloads, documents and all of that. In Windows 7 this is very easy by creating libraries and changing the locations.

I bought 6 of those SATA<>IDE adapters from ebay as well. Three of them didn't work. They're also frustrating because they don't allow you to put two on a cable.

I only buy these now. They work flawlessly and support cs/master/slave configuration but are indeed more expensive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16812119257

I bought one of those SATA to IDE adapters (same as in your video) a while ago, and it didn't work. Might have been DOD as I didn't get it to work on modern machines either for connecting an IDE DVD drive.

Doesn't speak well for their quality 😀

Have you worked this out? Interested to hear about the results... thinking of doing the same.

Half-Saint wrote:

Have you worked this out? Interested to hear about the results... thinking of doing the same.

Works fine with the Silicon Image card bought from Ebay (http://www.ebay.com/itm/4-SATA-S-ATA-Port-RAI … =item2556a904ec). Be aware NOT to use the VIA chipset card linked in the first post. It has no BIOS and is not bootable!

No drivers needed in DOS or Windows 98 unless you are using the RAID functionality.

The speed is also crazy (buffered read speed of 81000 kb/sec, while RAM throughput is 114 MB/sec), see picture from Speedsys

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I did a review on a SATA<>IDE adapter a while ago: […]
Show full quote

I did a review on a SATA<>IDE adapter a while ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpR-tiiVdUY

I believe the performance is sufficient to be used for a project like yours.

In general I also recommend a 200+ SSD these days. Prices have come down quite a bit. What is crucial though is having a platter drive for your media, downloads, documents and all of that. In Windows 7 this is very easy by creating libraries and changing the locations.

Interesting, it makes me curious to how something like those may work on a 386 or 486 with a small enough SATA harddrive/SSD... though I know a CF to IDE likely would be more ideal in this situation, but I can't help but remain curious.

I have a 64GB mSATA drive laying around that could be put into a mSATA to SATA adapter for a nice SSD for an old system like this. 😀

ReeseRiverson wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I did a review on a SATA<>IDE adapter a while ago: […]
Show full quote

I did a review on a SATA<>IDE adapter a while ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpR-tiiVdUY

I believe the performance is sufficient to be used for a project like yours.

In general I also recommend a 200+ SSD these days. Prices have come down quite a bit. What is crucial though is having a platter drive for your media, downloads, documents and all of that. In Windows 7 this is very easy by creating libraries and changing the locations.

Interesting, it makes me curious to how something like those may work on a 386 or 486 with a small enough SATA harddrive/SSD... though I know a CF to IDE likely would be more ideal in this situation, but I can't help but remain curious.

I have a 64GB mSATA drive laying around that could be put into a mSATA to SATA adapter for a nice SSD for an old system like this. 😀

User kokornov reported problems with IDE to SATA adapters with his SSD drive. I dunno if that was just one single case, or if it's general problem as I've never tested my SSD drives with IDE/SATA adapters. He recommended SSD with PCI SATA controller.

Tbh you do not need a SSD for a 386 or 486. Here a newer quick silent IDE drive or a CF card works more than good enough (as long as you don't use that CF card with Win9x). I would say SSD only starts to really pay off when you are going to install Windows9x and above on Pentium machines.

These SATA <> IDE adapters don't fix the BIOX limitations. This is something to be aware of.

Whereas with PCI SATA controllers, or any dedicated controller card with its own BIOS, this is being taken care of.