Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I'm hoping that there will be a CD emulator like the one for floppies 😀 One that can do BIN / CUE and play Audio CD tracks 🤣

I really hope for the same. While it's great playing GoG games on my time machine, it would be handy if such a tool existed so that I can avoid optical media entirely.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

That tool is handy to have!

Theres is also this 'universal' little thing I found in my travels:

http://ssd.windows98.co.uk/

Checks if the partition is correctly aligned, and can send TRIM commands to at least some SSD controllers:

The father of the creature wrote:

"... it works on indilinx and marvell controlled ssd's (which are the 2 crucial have used) from any manufacturer. I don't believe it will be all that effective on SF drives (I know why and will sort that out in a later version). I can't speak for any other controller. It can't do any harm - it just might not help."

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drive … -p/51198/page/2

Do any of those tools have command line options? If not I suppose a macro could be made.

To my knowledge Intel and OCZ have tools for enterprise SSDs with command line interface, but I'm not sure if they'd work on mundane client SSDs.

Ouch, puntualizations to the use of modern SSD tools software to administer the TRIM command to SSDs in old comps.

OCZ Tools 4.4 at least is useless and dangerous on a s478 ASUS P4P800, probably because of this mobo lacking AHCI support.

Pushing the TRIM button in Win XP just FUBARs the SSD 😵 (as could be expected, for XP doesn't support TRIM).

In Se7en the application just hangs 😒 (although "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" returns "0"), without screwing the SSD.

So for SSDs on ancient comps without AHCI the best housekeeping would be ~1 hour at BIOS or logged-off from time to time (to let garbage collection do its work), and/or occasionally unplugging the SSD from the relic and plugging it into some modern comp with AHCI and Se7en to let TRIM work reliably.

Still messy.... I decided to use a 7200 RPM 2.5" laptop drive and it's worked flawlessly. The speeds are good enough for me..

Artex wrote:

Still messy ...

Please don't get me wrong, it's far from being a mess 😀 .

The vast majority of users don't need to worry about TRIM or garbage collection (any decent SSD does its GC automatically in the background), only impenitent geeks like here your servant feel the urge to tinker with that.

I strongly disagree with some of the posts in this thread. Statements like "useless" are quite misinforming. I only ever used a CF card in my Pentium III/98SE system and don't have any problems at all. I even didn't set it to DMA originally, so there was some slowdown for a few seconds when saving a game, but even that didn't bother me too much.

I also don't see the point at all in throwing benchmarks around to show that a modern HDD or SSD is faster. That is obvious anyway, but why bother with this when all I'm gonna do on such a PC is play a game once in a while? A CF is still vastly quicker than an old HDD for this. To prevent it from dying too early I simply turn off swapping and load the machine with the max amount of RAM. Maybe my use case is simply different though 😀

Are there motherboards that support W98 AND have integrated SATA ports?

d1stortion wrote:

... Statements like "useless" are quite misinforming ...

Well the TRIM button is definitely useless and nocive on this mobo (though it works fine in modern systems). Drive info and SMART work OK. The firmware update, I better wouldn't try it on old mobos.

d1stortion wrote:

... I also don't see the point at all in throwing benchmarks around to show that a modern HDD or SSD is faster. That is obvious anyway, but why bother with this when all I'm gonna do on such a PC is play a game once in a while? ...

My apologies if I've been boring you. It will not happen again.

d1stortion wrote:

A CF is still vastly quicker than an old HDD for this. To prevent it from dying too early I simply turn off swapping and load the machine with the max amount of RAM ...

There are many more tricks to protect flash drives from Windows, but you'd probably not see the point so I'll not waste your time.

Heh, guess I should have specified more clearly which posts I was talking about... didn't expect someone to take it that personally however 🤣

I actually didn't have any of your posts in mind at all, but rather meant this:

vetz wrote:

I figured this out in 2007 on my Compaq. The cards have problems with sequential reading/writing making them useless in Windows. This is the reason why I'm using first gen SATA SSD drives in two of my retro machines with SATA PCi cards( performance is equal to about 75% of the RAM performance according to SpeedSys, which is just insane)

I just tried to say that I disagree with such a universal statement on CF cards under Windows, given that they do the trick fine enough for me, not that your posts would bore me or anything similar. That's all 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Are there motherboards that support W98se AND have integrated SATA ports?

Aopen Ak89 Max: http://www.anandtech.com/show/1303

AMD Athlon64 Socket 754 board with 8x AGP.

I own one (I was lucky to find one on ebay some time in 2012 for $45), nforce3-150 chipset, and SATA-150 onboard (although it's through the Silicon Image 3114 Chip), but the big reason I mention this board is Aopen has full Win98se drivers for all onboard features and functions on this board, including the onboard gigabit NIC, which can actually negotiate and obtain a gigabit connection, if your storage solution can manage to read/write fast enough to handle the speed.

I have tested a 80 GB Sata-150 hard drive and it will detect, and install windows on this, on this board and run just fine.

Edit: Also I've read this entire thread and I do not see a link to ATTO benchmark you're running in Win98se, could someone link me to a copy of that so I can see how one of my 98se machines is doing please?

kithylin wrote:

Edit: Also I've read this entire thread and I do not see a link to ATTO benchmark you're running in Win98se, could someone link me to a copy of that so I can see how one of my 98se machines is doing please?

Did a benchmark on my current storage configuration that I use on my AOpen Slot 1 BX440 board.

I use a IDE to SATA adapter. The HDD is a 2TB Samsung Spinpoint, jumper set to SATA 1 and using SEATOOLS capacity limited to 32 GB.

Here the results:

Been using it for all my recent projects and it didn't have any issues. DMA mode works fine too. Using the same adapter for a SATA DVD burner as well 😀

I prefer this solution over using PCI SATA controllers to be honest.

For those that already run SCSI hardware, there also are SATA to SCSI adapters available.

Which opens the possibility of SSDs on the SCSI bus. 😁

Very expensive though...

Here the same SATA to IDE adapter but on a S370 board with Intel 815E B-step chipset and a PIII-S 1.4 GHz: