Planning to install SSD in my Windows 98 machine. Help, advice, suggestions, etc.? - Page 5 \ VOGONS Skip to content VOGONS Search… Search Advanced search Just this topic Search Search… Search Advanced search Just this topic Common searches Active topics Main menu Login Login Username Password 2FA token (optional) Remember me Hide my online status this session Log in Lost password Send activation email or Create a new account Create a new account Breadcrumbs Board index Marvin, the Paranoid Android General Old Hardware Common searches Active topics Planning to install SSD in my Windows 98 machine. Help, advice, suggestions, etc.? Topic actions Post a reply Pagination Page 1 Page 4 Page 5 Jump to page: Reply 80 of 89, by darry Posted on 2020-10-23, 22:42 Reply with quote Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license More actions Reply with quote CC-BY-4.0 license darry Offline User metadata Posts 4969 Joined 2014-01-20, 06:27 Location Canada Rank l33t Rank l33t Posts 4969 Joined 2014-01-20, 06:27 Location Canada khyypio wrote on 2020-10-23, 21:06: So I changed the 40-pin IDE-ribbon to 80-pin cable and that did the trick! Now DMA works and when I ran the benchmark, the results made me so excited I almost started screaming 😁 Here, look at those numbers and that beautiful cohesive curve! Atto860EVOnew.jpg Now I can finally continue working on my video! You guys have been a tremendous help, without your input this probably would´ve just left undone. So thanks everybody, big thankies all around!!! Really happy that it worked and, lucky you, your board does not default to UDMA66 like mine does . My guess is your issue with UDMA was likely due to your board trying to do UDMA100 over a 40-conductor cable. Your IDE to SD card probably tops off at UDMA33 in terms of advertized speed capabilities, so it just worked . So your issue was either due to a BIOS bug or your cable was out of spec in a way that made the board think it had 80 conductors (I believe pin 34 is used for that). Reply 81 of 89, by khyypio Posted on 2020-10-24, 23:32 Reply with quote Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license More actions Reply with quote CC-BY-4.0 license khyypio Offline User metadata Posts 165 Joined 2019-08-16, 12:44 Location Finland Rank Member Rank Member Posts 165 Joined 2019-08-16, 12:44 Location Finland darry wrote on 2020-10-23, 22:42: khyypio wrote on 2020-10-23, 21:06: So I changed the 40-pin IDE-ribbon to 80-pin cable and that did the trick! Now DMA works and when I ran the benchmark, the results made me so excited I almost started screaming 😁 Here, look at those numbers and that beautiful cohesive curve! Atto860EVOnew.jpg Now I can finally continue working on my video! You guys have been a tremendous help, without your input this probably would´ve just left undone. So thanks everybody, big thankies all around!!! Really happy that it worked and, lucky you, your board does not default to UDMA66 like mine does . My guess is your issue with UDMA was likely due to your board trying to do UDMA100 over a 40-conductor cable. Your IDE to SD card probably tops off at UDMA33 in terms of advertized speed capabilities, so it just worked . So your issue was either due to a BIOS bug or your cable was out of spec in a way that made the board think it had 80 conductors (I believe pin 34 is used for that). Thanks! I tested my SD2IDE solution with the 80 wire cable and it doesn´t work with it, it hits the blue screen of death when booting. I doubt it´s my BIOS, I updated it to its latest official version when I got it (9p), so it´s probably the cable. SSD with the Startech adapter not working well with the 40 wire cable and SD card with SD2IDE adapter not working at all with the 80 wire cable would suggest just that. Anyways, I´ve been working on my video and it should be ready sometime next week. I´ll post a link here as soon as it´s published! 😀 Reply 82 of 89, by piatd Posted on 2020-10-25, 01:50 Reply with quote Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license More actions Reply with quote CC-BY-4.0 license piatd Offline User metadata Posts 54 Joined 2019-10-10, 03:09 Rank Newbie Rank Newbie Posts 54 Joined 2019-10-10, 03:09 Now that the OP has solved his problem, please allow me to go on this tangent. Ozzuneoj wrote on 2020-10-21, 14:50: I've used a dozen different CF cards in DOS, 9x and XP, I've used repurposed 16GB Kingston M. 2 SSDs ripped from Chromebooks (using three adapters to connect to IDE) in 9x and XP, I've used old 64GB Crucial C300 SSDs in 9x and XP ... I've never seen an SSD based system bogged down at all, let alone to the point that it was worse than a hard drive. It's also worth noting, my 98SE tester system has been running on a 16GB SSD like this for 2-3 years. The way I test hardware, I actually make copies of the Windows folder for each configuration (for example, one for testing Voodoo 3 cards, one for testing TNT cards, one for testing Sound Blaster ISA cards), so I have it boot to command prompt each time and then rename the appropriate folder "Windows" to test a certain piece of hardware. Works great, but requires a fair amount of space and lots of copying to create new folders (renaming one to change the configuration is instant however). I've never had issues with this, running on a super basic 16GB MLC drive that was used in a Chromebook for who-knows-how-long. No overprovisioning, lots of writes, no TRIM... and I use it frequently. It might benchmark more slowly now if I hooked it up to a new PC, but there's no way the difference is noticeable on the 440BX + PIII 850Mhz system in which it's being used. Are you really using three adapters for that M.2 drive in your 440BX machine? There are plenty of M.2 to 44-pin adapters (including nice ones that come with a case), but you'd still need an IDE 44-pin to 40-pin adapter, for a total of two. Has anyone found an M.2 to IDE 40-pin adapter or an M.2 to IDE 80-pin adapter? Reply 83 of 89, by khyypio Posted on 2020-10-28, 13:57 Reply with quote Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license More actions Reply with quote CC-BY-4.0 license khyypio Offline User metadata Posts 165 Joined 2019-08-16, 12:44 Location Finland Rank Member Rank Member Posts 165 Joined 2019-08-16, 12:44 Location Finland My video is ready! Once more, thanks for help everyone! https://youtu.be/KCOWvABTykA Reply 84 of 89, by Con 2 botones Posted on 2020-10-28, 15:09 Reply with quote Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license More actions Reply with quote CC-BY-4.0 license Con 2 botones Offline User metadata Posts 249 Joined 2019-08-26, 13:35 Location Montevideo, Uruguay Rank Member Rank Member Posts 249 Joined 2019-08-26, 13:35 Location Montevideo, Uruguay khyypio wrote on 2020-10-28, 13:57: My video is ready! Once more, thanks for help everyone! https://youtu.be/KCOWvABTykA I am familiar with the IDE-to-SD adapter. Using it in my main retroPC which only has a 66mhz IDE bus, so I think it is suitable, feels snappy enough. But it is good to know that and SSD is also an alternative (maybe an inexpensive 120GB Silicon Power one would do). I liked the side by side booting comparison you did at the end of your video. Keep the vintage PC content coming! What does "KPH" stands for, by the way? Reply 85 of 89, by douglar Posted on 2020-10-28, 15:38 Reply with quote Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license More actions Reply with quote CC-BY-4.0 license douglar Offline User metadata Posts 601 Joined 2019-11-04, 15:37 Rank Oldbie Rank Oldbie Posts 601 Joined 2019-11-04, 15:37 Ozzuneoj wrote on 2020-10-21, 14:50: Edited for clarification: Also, from my understanding, modern SSDs have better garbage collection features built in to the controller and can maintain themselves well enough to function acceptably without TRIM in light workloads... certainly those expected in a DOS\9x machine would qualify as "light" by modern standards. I could be wrong, but I don't believe CF cards have any of these features, and yet people use them all the time for retro systems with very few problems. I just found a nice simple article about TRIM as well. If it was recommended but not 100% necessary 5 years ago, then with newer drives on an OS from the 90s, I don't think you absolutely need it. I do two things to do to lighten the write load on my solid state devices in Windows98se installs: I set BootGUI=0 in c:\msdos.sys I only want DOS about 75% of the time, so this saves time and some writes. When I want windows, I run "Win" from C:\. I set ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 in the 386Enh section of system.ini. Win98se pre-emptively writes stale page-able memory to the swap file in case it needs to swap that out in the future when ConservativeSwapfileUsage=0. This had benefits back in the day when memory was expensive and hard drives were slow. Now when 32MB+ of memory is easy to find and the disks have been replaced with solid state, I turn on the conservative paging because I don't need the unnecessary stream of writes to the page file. -- I put this at the end of my msbatch.inf file to set this on every build: [Edit.Files] %30%\msdos.sys,Options,,"BootGUI=0" %10%\system.ini,386Enh,,"ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1" Reply 86 of 89, by khyypio Posted on 2020-10-29, 07:48 Reply with quote Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license More actions Reply with quote CC-BY-4.0 license khyypio Offline User metadata Posts 165 Joined 2019-08-16, 12:44 Location Finland Rank Member Rank Member Posts 165 Joined 2019-08-16, 12:44 Location Finland Con 2 botones wrote on 2020-10-28, 15:09: I am familiar with the IDE-to-SD adapter. Using it in my main retroPC which only has a 66mhz IDE bus, so I think it is suitable, […] Show full quote khyypio wrote on 2020-10-28, 13:57: My video is ready! Once more, thanks for help everyone! https://youtu.be/KCOWvABTykA I am familiar with the IDE-to-SD adapter. Using it in my main retroPC which only has a 66mhz IDE bus, so I think it is suitable, feels snappy enough. But it is good to know that and SSD is also an alternative (maybe an inexpensive 120GB Silicon Power one would do). I liked the side by side booting comparison you did at the end of your video. Keep the vintage PC content coming! What does "KPH" stands for, by the way? I always liked my IDE to SD solution, the 25 MB/s limit just bothered me. KPH are just my initials, since I thought it would be super original to be retro geek in Youtube with three letters... 😁 Reply 87 of 89, by khyypio Posted on 2020-11-07, 12:01 Reply with quote Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license More actions Reply with quote CC-BY-4.0 license khyypio Offline User metadata Posts 165 Joined 2019-08-16, 12:44 Location Finland Rank Member Rank Member Posts 165 Joined 2019-08-16, 12:44 Location Finland Okay, it´s been a couple weeks and this machine works great! There´s just one problem: DOS games that use to work previously doesn´t work anymore. Commander Keens, Cosmos Cosmic Adventure, Prince Of Persia, Duke Nukem 1 & 2, etc. all played without problems, now they won´t even start. This can´t be due to the SSD, right? Must be something wrong with my configuration but what? Reply 88 of 89, by darry Posted on 2020-11-07, 17:01 Reply with quote Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license More actions Reply with quote CC-BY-4.0 license darry Offline User metadata Posts 4969 Joined 2014-01-20, 06:27 Location Canada Rank l33t Rank l33t Posts 4969 Joined 2014-01-20, 06:27 Location Canada khyypio wrote on 2020-11-07, 12:01: Okay, it´s been a couple weeks and this machine works great! There´s just one problem: DOS games that use to work previously doesn´t work anymore. Commander Keens, Cosmos Cosmic Adventure, Prince Of Persia, Duke Nukem 1 & 2, etc. all played without problems, now they won´t even start. This can´t be due to the SSD, right? Must be something wrong with my configuration but what? If it was due to data corruption, I would imagine that Windows would have been affected as well . Maybe some corruption occurred while you you were testing things out (before you you got a stable setup). Anyway, the best way to eliminate that scenario as a possibility would be to re-copy at least some of the said games from a known good source and try them again . If they still don't work, it's likely not corruption . If re-copying does seem to fix it, it likely is corruption . It would be hard to say what caused and when it occurred with any degree of certainty. Another scenario to consider is a virus . Reply 89 of 89, by khyypio Posted on 2020-11-19, 12:19 Reply with quote Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license More actions Reply with quote CC-BY-4.0 license khyypio Offline User metadata Posts 165 Joined 2019-08-16, 12:44 Location Finland Rank Member Rank Member Posts 165 Joined 2019-08-16, 12:44 Location Finland darry wrote on 2020-11-07, 17:01: If it was due to data corruption, I would imagine that Windows would have been affected as well . Maybe some corruption occurred […] Show full quote khyypio wrote on 2020-11-07, 12:01: Okay, it´s been a couple weeks and this machine works great! There´s just one problem: DOS games that use to work previously doesn´t work anymore. Commander Keens, Cosmos Cosmic Adventure, Prince Of Persia, Duke Nukem 1 & 2, etc. all played without problems, now they won´t even start. This can´t be due to the SSD, right? Must be something wrong with my configuration but what? If it was due to data corruption, I would imagine that Windows would have been affected as well . Maybe some corruption occurred while you you were testing things out (before you you got a stable setup). Anyway, the best way to eliminate that scenario as a possibility would be to re-copy at least some of the said games from a known good source and try them again . If they still don't work, it's likely not corruption . If re-copying does seem to fix it, it likely is corruption . It would be hard to say what caused and when it occurred with any degree of certainty. Another scenario to consider is a virus . This was a clean install, I didn´t just copy-paste my previous confiuguration. And virus isn´t really a possibility here. But I may have figured this out and the problem could be Unofficial Service Pack 3.65... Go to top of page Go to top of page Page 1 Page 4 Page 5 Jump to page: Back to General Old Hardware VOGONS site design is distributed under a CC BY-NC license. User-generated content is distributed under our open content policy. © 2002–2022 vogons.org. Terms of use Privacy policy Contact us Close window Close window