The most reliable host-swappable anything I ever saw with Win9x was PCMCIA-cards. Those worked really well on laptops, and you could even get a PCI->PCMCIA card that provided such a slot for desktop PCs, which functioned identically. Mine was based on a chip from Ricoh, but I sold it because it ended up being more a novelty for me than anything else. I never used it for storage either (network- & sound cards), but I imagine some storage devices might have been made for the PCMCIA slot as well.

The SCSI standard itself supports hot-swapping, but that doesn't mean individual devices do, nor drivers for those devices in your specific OS. That explains the mixed comments.

How big are the files you are talking about? Back in the day, floppies were used for this kind of thing, when they got too small, things like ZIP drives let you do 100MB per disk (until it went *click*). After that CDRW was generally medium of choice.

But maybe a step back: why not just use network? In particular, FTP will work on everything from an XT (or older in some cases) up to a Ryzen/Core monster. I ensure all my fixed setups are networked and use that for file transfer. The only time I mess around with actual drives is when I'm building/testing something and then having to reboot for changing CF card is less of an issue.

Also, if the purpose is just to transfer files, why is the networking option not worth it? No wireless on the Win9x PC? Use a cheap N-class router with openwrt to bridge it to your WLAN if you're not keen on wires. Then besides FTP you can also use putty and pscp. Just transfer the files over SSH from your modern system to the Win9x-PC. I assume the system has a 100 Mbit NIC. That will fly compared to anything USB-related. USB 2.0 has terrible CPU overhead on these old PCs.

Don't underestimate the load of SSH AES calculations on old CPUs - if you want better speeds than USB 1.1, you don't want to add that overhead. It's pointless for security as Win9x in general and any SSH implementations for it are hopelessly out of date anyway. No condom (FTP) is better than a leaky condom that tears 😉

Depends on CPU. AthlonXP 3200+ does full 10MB/s over 100Mb network and i use it from time to time simply because ssh is already there anyway while ftp needs configuration and is not very secure if the server is left always on.

dionb wrote on 2025-09-10, 08:25:

The SCSI standard itself supports hot-swapping, but that doesn't mean individual devices do, nor drivers for those devices in your specific OS. That explains the mixed comments.

How big are the files you are talking about? Back in the day, floppies were used for this kind of thing, when they got too small, things like ZIP drives let you do 100MB per disk (until it went *click*). After that CDRW was generally medium of choice.

But maybe a step back: why not just use network? In particular, FTP will work on everything from an XT (or older in some cases) up to a Ryzen/Core monster. I ensure all my fixed setups are networked and use that for file transfer. The only time I mess around with actual drives is when I'm building/testing something and then having to reboot for changing CF card is less of an issue.

Probably somewhere in the hundreds of megabytes at a time to the large secondary drive I have in this PC, otherwise I'd just use a simple flash drive like I normally do. I want to be able to move entire patched games to it easily without having to take the case apart and plug the hard drive into my main PC. Optical media hasn't been my friend as of late. Mostly don't want to resort to FTP because I was assuming Win9x era struggles a bit with wireless, but maybe there are workarounds. Just finished drywalling the area I have my computer in and I really don't feel like tearing into it and routing any cabling at the moment 🤣

altarofmelektaus wrote on 2025-09-10, 10:09:

[...]

Probably somewhere in the hundreds of megabytes at a time to the large secondary drive I have in this PC, otherwise I'd just use a simple flash drive like I normally do. I want to be able to move entire patched games to it easily without having to take the case apart and plug the hard drive into my main PC. Optical media hasn't been my friend as of late. Mostly don't want to resort to FTP because I was assuming Win9x era struggles a bit with wireless, but maybe there are workarounds. Just finished drywalling the area I have my computer in and I really don't feel like tearing into it and routing any cabling at the moment 🤣

Drywalling an area you already know you're going to be having computers and then not sorting out cabling first? That sounds like a planning fail...

But taking that as a given there are multiple options for wireless networking old computers. TLDR: leonardo's suggestion is best for your use case - get an old router/AP and set it to wireless (client) bridge mode, so it connects to your WiFi and then allows you to hook up other systems (your old stuff) via Ethernet. Cheap or free if you have suitable hardware lying around. Also no more complicated on the vintage PCs than getting Ethernet up and running.

Alternatives:
- find one of the very few WiFi adapters with Win98SE support that also supports WPA2 encryption and hook it up directly to your WiFi network. Won't work on Win95, won't work with >95% of adapters out there; either no Win9x support or no WPA2 support.
- find one of the slightly more common category of adapters with Win9x (or even DOS...) support without WPA2. Run an unsecured guest network for them and connect directly. Not recommended (note that WEP is worse than no security)
- use a PicoGUS or PicoMEM card that has WiFi onboard and exposes it as a generic NE2000 ISA adapter to the host system. Fully secure and pretty foolproof - but the 8b ISA interface isn't going to be any faster than USB 1.1...
- use an ESP32-based modem emulator that you hook up to a serial port. Very authentic, can even give you modem sounds. Downside is that it gives you very authentic 1990s transfer rates as well.

Or depending on wiring you could also consider powerline (over power wiring) or MoCA (over TV coax) to get conncetivity through that wall. MoCA is usually pretty bulletproof and more than fast enough (MoCA 2.5 can saturate a 1GbE link). Powerline varies massively based on country, electrical system and your own wiring. I tend not to recommend, although I have a set in use myself - but that's partly because I need to grok this stuff for work 😉

Archer57 wrote on 2025-09-10, 09:40:

Depends on CPU. AthlonXP 3200+ does full 10MB/s over 100Mb network and i use it from time to time simply because ssh is already there anyway while ftp needs configuration and is not very secure if the server is left always on.

Another reason to run the FTP server on the old system rather than the new one. It's only on when you need it, and there's no vulnerable server ever running on the internet-connected modern system. Additional benefit is that you can use a fast, user friendly client app like FileZilla on a big high-res display instead of mucking around on whatever the vintage system can show (not a huge issue with Win9x, but when you're on CGA, this makes a difference).

dionb wrote on 2025-09-10, 08:50:

Don't underestimate the load of SSH AES calculations on old CPUs - if you want better speeds than USB 1.1, you don't want to add that overhead. It's pointless for security as Win9x in general and any SSH implementations for it are hopelessly out of date anyway. No condom (FTP) is better than a leaky condom that tears 😉

Actually, the latest PuTTY is completely up-to-date for Win95. I had a chat with the author when the old version I was using refused to negotiate ciphers with a modern Mac. Turns he hadn't really tested support in a long time, but just a day or so later he'd updated the latest build to run on Win95 again. A wonderfully humble and friendly dev from my experience.

Anyway, to your point, maybe it's a little slower than naked FTP (I can't tell, my slowest system is a K6-III), but it is more secure for sure, and SSH servers are pretty standard oob stuff on your *nix-based operating systems now (not sure if modern Windows finally ships with one or no). Then again, maybe if you run the server on the Win9x box and not the other way around, it doesn't matter.

leonardo wrote on 2025-09-10, 20:41:

dionb wrote on 2025-09-10, 08:50:

Don't underestimate the load of SSH AES calculations on old CPUs - if you want better speeds than USB 1.1, you don't want to add that overhead. It's pointless for security as Win9x in general and any SSH implementations for it are hopelessly out of date anyway. No condom (FTP) is better than a leaky condom that tears 😉

Actually, the latest PuTTY is completely up-to-date for Win95. I had a chat with the author when the old version I was using refused to negotiate ciphers with a modern Mac. Turns he hadn't really tested support in a long time, but just a day or so later he'd updated the latest build to run on Win95 again. A wonderfully humble and friendly dev from my experience.

Anyway, to your point, maybe it's a little slower than naked FTP (I can't tell, my slowest system is a K6-III), but it is more secure for sure, and SSH servers are pretty standard oob stuff on your *nix-based operating systems now (not sure if modern Windows finally ships with one or no). Then again, maybe if you run the server on the Win9x box and not the other way around, it doesn't matter.

I've also messed with this in the past.

I have run PuTTY as far back as a 486DX-33 (It requires a special compile, because PuTTY doesn't check whether CPUID instruction is supported before using it). It works. Slowly.

If you tune your cipher suites, you may try ChaCha20-Poly1305 rather than AES-GCM, because on CPUs lacking AESNI instructions (including yours), ChaCha20 should be faster.

On my Pentium 166, it can sftp at about 700KB/sec. So not fast at all, I guess somewhat inline with USB 1.1 as dionb suggested, but tolerable for files up to a few tens of megabytes.

leonardo wrote on 2025-09-10, 08:21:

I imagine some storage devices might have been made for the PCMCIA slot as well.

There sure was: CompactFlash cards. They just require a passive adapter.

Another thing you could try is DDLINK, it supports network transfers, uses
it's own (very efficent) protocl, and talks directoy the the network via a
"packet driver" - no network "stack" and very low system overhead.

All my DOS systems are still on an old 10mbps switch - so I've not done much
testing on 100m or faster networks, but at 10m it comes pretty close to the
maximum theoritical 10m transfer speeds - so I think you are going to be
CPU/system limited than DDLINK itself.

I did post a bit about the speeds tests a while back:

Re: DDLINK: Easily move files between/To/From DOS systems

Keep in mind that DDLINK does network, serial and parallel transfers, so that
discussion is more about serial<>parallel.

My memories of using 9x for this are foggy, but when I worked at a small PC repair shop over 20 years ago we hot-swapped IDE drives all the time even though you are not supposed to do that. Given the timeframe (2003-2006) we were likely doing it on XP 90% of the time. We had extra long round IDE cables and molex power extensions run out through the back of our test systems so we could quickly attach hard drives for scanning and copying data. We'd just plug the IDE cable in, then the power (carefully... misaligning it would trip the PSU and shut the system down... oops), wait for the drive to spin up, then refresh device manager and the drive would pop up as if we'd just plugged in a flash drive.

I used my own personal machine for a couple years and it is still my test rig for early-2000s video cards 20 years later.

It's funny the crazy things we did at the time to avoid those painfully long reboots before the SSD days.

Sorry, this is probably not helpful since that's basically what you're doing with CF cards and it apparently isn't working.

I'm confused. You don't want to install a USB 2.0 card because you want your solution to be removable, but you will install a SCSI or network card? Are you sure you aren't looking for a problem instead of a solution?

It's your computer, but I would just install a USB 2.0 card and be done with it. If you want to get even faster, there is always firewire, too. Or even ESATA if you can find a card with Windows 98 drivers (difficult but not impossible)

Network is definitely the way to go. It's well supported in Windows, even more so then USB.

Although I wouldn't bother with wireless, It can be made to work but just not worth it IMHO,
Much better to install a network card and have a modern wireless bridge on the other end of the cable or Powerline adapter (also what I use)

or If your other computer is close to the retro PC you could use a cross over cable direct between the 2 machines.

Hot swapping hard drives was enterprise level hardware and as such typically required Windows NT variants.

An external disk enclosure with a SCA backplane can provide hot-swap SCSI hardware support, however, I don't believe that Win9X has the facilities to offline a volume. If I recall correctly, the concept was initially introduced with NTFS.

I would just run an smb1 server on the network and do everything over it that way, preferably by wire but if wire doesn't reach via a wifi bridge thing.

On ssh: my rh8.0-running 200mmx scp's faster than usb1.1, the p120 just under. 686 and up are totally fine with it. FTP is really a backwards protocol.

If you are running a 486, I guess waiting for the network or the usb1.1 will be the least of your waiting you will be doing in general.

Network has been my medium of choice for file transfers since the mid-late 90's.

That's what I wondered. Well that settles it, I'm going the networking route. Thanks all!