Run Windows 98 on SD Card vs HDD and SSD 

SD cards still have a Flash Translation Layer for wear levelling. No worries there. They're slow because they don't have enough RAM to hold the FTL in the controller, so it has to go to the flash to figure out where blocks are stored on the flash, and when writing it can only handle one thread, so unlike an SSD write performance does not scale up with multiple threads.

My Win98 machine uses an SD card as its main drive. I've never had any issues with it, and the performance is really not that bad, it's not like the machine is super fast in the first place. I've never had an issue with stuttering during disk access or anything like that. For me the biggest convenience of an SD card is that I can do the Win98 install using VMWare on my modern PC directly to the SD card, then pop it into the adapter on the retro PC to finish setup. Since SD cards are cheap, I can also keep a booklet of pre-configured OS setups ready to swap out whenever I want. Backup is also very easy, just take the SD card out and put it in a modern PC and image the card all without having to open the PC.

Phil's Computer Lab - Making my Windows 98 PC Great!

Win98SE on a PCIe Gen 4 NVME. Now that's putting a fusion reactor on a Model T.

Like. Windows 98 hardware and software is very interesting.

Loved the way you tested those Phil with the Win98 install, great idea, I think the feeling we get that SD Cards are so much faster is just access time especially with older builds, I've used almost every different type of storage for Win 98 machines and I really find it hard not to keep going back to decent 40-120gb IDE HDD's but I've been fairly lucky with reliability. 🤞🤞

Fantastic comparison, thanks for putting this together. Awhile back, I switched my (original one BTW) Win98 system from it's HDD to a IDE-CF setup, for ease of backup, getting files onto the system, and of course to replace the aging HDD.

I love the adapter in my retro PC, definitely one of the better purchases I made for it. I don’t normally use it as a boot drive but instead for data storage, things like installing Windows 98, large file transfers, ghost backups, etc. It’s split into 3x2GB partitions for DOS support and the rest for Win98. When I do use it for OSs, it’s ones I don’t intend to keep e.g. messing around with OS/2 (the adapter is on the secondary IDE, so I can ‘protect’ the main SSD by just disabling the primary IDE controller in BIOS).

My oldest laptop the Toshiba Satellite 330cds that I still have and works fine still has it's original 4 gb hard drive with a date of October of 1998. Still works fine with Windows 98 second edition.

Absolutely amazing benchmarks man, and has really helped solidify what I would want to do with hard drive solutions for 98. Thanks so much, your videos have been an invaluable resource for re-learning these OS!

This confirms my preference for sata SSDs for win98 machines.

Love seeing the comparisons. Makes an overall very compelling case for an SSD, but I still can't give up using a microSD with a 3d printed 5.25 bay adapter off ebay for the ide/sd adapter, because it's so easy to pop the SD in and out to connect it to my main PC, or to swap out different SD's with different windows installations/driver combos.

I have actually used SD cards as main Windows drives and i have found them to be anything but reliable. I used them mostly in retro laptops with Windows 98 and Windows XP and they fail pretty quickly if they are written to a lot

Crushed that like button before I even watched it. Of course Phil's videos will be well prepared, well-edited, and thorough. Can't get enough of these! And yes, I was planning to do the same thing with a recent adapter and SD card that I picked up!

SSDs/SD cards may be reliable, but nothing can replace the incessant whirring and clunking of a proper dinosaur drive lol

Another use case for SD cards; projects and testing. If you’re doing a temporary build or just want to try out a configuration before committing SD cards are a perfect use case. The IDEtoSD can mount on the expansion bracket with a 3d print holder and is very convenient and easy to eject/update.

I have front 2.5" hot-swap bays in my old machines alongside IDE to SATA adapters. It's easy to swap SSDs around between machines including a modern PC (with a SATA to USB adapter) to back up the entire drive or restore an image from backup, or just copy files around in explorer.

Great Video Phil. I use the SD to IDE adapters in my machines. Thanks for all the work you do for us.

Thanks for the video Phil. These SD adapters are great for retro PCs. I've used this adapter with 2 sd cards to boot Win 98 and Win XP on a p4 system with ISA slot. I got an SD card slot extender cable for mine so that the card slot sat on my desk for easier swapping of cards. The extender that I had slowed the read/write speeds down a bit though, but I felt it was still useable for games.

I use hdd and sdcards for Windows 95 / 98 and msdos. I think, sdcards are better for transfer games and programs and make a backup of the disk. However, I was convinced that sd cards made my systems faster. Thanks for this complete test, we can see that hdd's still have a future in our old PC's!

Excellent comparison! Bigger HDDs, 160-200 GB IDE ones, are excellent for Win98SE, they have awesome performance, and the compatibility is top notch, at least compared to SSDs and SD cards.

Since you're bringing up SSDs on a 9x system, which involves SATA to IDE adaptors, I have to strongly, STRONGLY caution against the cheap green adaptors all over eBay. I've had them brick SSDs permanently. Use a Startech if you're going to adapt SATA to IDE. Do NOT cheap out here.

I used 2 CF on my retro PCs (Windows 98 SE) and they broke down in about half a year of common working and playing. So I switched to more or less live conventional HDD. They work perfectly.

Phiiiil, I have one of those converters coming in the post. perfect timing!.

I use SD and CF on several of my retro machines. However, I tend to mix them with a regular HDD if using Windows 9x because of the "swap/pagefile" so that I don't kill the card.

I use SD cards in almost all my windows 95/98 machines. 32GB SD cards are like $10-15, super cheap, super easy to replace. I've been trying to eliminate mechanical HDD from everything I own, as I find them too unreliable and have had dozens die over the years.

I much prefer using a HDD when possible. I love how they sound, and a silent retro-PC just feels..wrong. :) I've had pretty good luck with reusing a bunch of WD 160GB drives I got from some old office PCs a couple of years ago, and they perform very well. The bottleneck back then wasn't really the storage device but IDE, so a fast SSD doesn't help that much with performance - as you witnessed. Anyway, great video Phil - as always. :)

Very good comparison, I have to say I am surprised. I use SD cards in all my retro PCs, and while I've done no comparisons, I would have assumed that SD cards would run rounds around HDDs. Even in my 386 I use a 256MB SD card, and the system feels very fast.

Recently, I tried out an eBay laptop IDE to SD converter on an old Dell Latitude paired with a SanDisk ultra 80MB/s 16GB (SD card tested fine on a modern PC). It surprised me how slow it was, so much slower than the IDE desktop converters and even slower than an actual 4GB laptop hard disk. Windows 98 also had random issues and errors. Thank you for taking the time to make this.

I'm so happy that I still have a few of those Seagate drives brand new in the foil...I have found compatibility issues with some ssd based storage and a real ide drive can't be beat for compatibility

I've recently had 3 Seagate drives exactly like the one in this video all fail the same way: component burnout on the controller board. That's why I'm exploring options like these. While CF is the easiest, the SATA to PATA adaptors usually work well too. Those are compatible with smaller SSDs that should fit within the bios capacity limits of some of my systems, so that may be the next experiment.

BTW if you miss mechanical noise for SD cards/SSDs, there is a dedicated HDD clicker to work around that. LGR reviewed it a while ago.

G'day Phil, WOW! Really interesting Comparison, you can basically find an adapter for anything these days & yeah those small capacity SD Cards with Adapter would come in handy for really old OS that have compatability issues with large capacity drives especially now it is basically impossible to find Quality SSDs under 120GB. If I was to do IDE Performance Benchmrking I would chose the 2.5" SSD & Adapter Option, my oldest OS is XP so no size issues & I have some 120/128GB SSDs + also still plentiful at shops.

I've had a lot of luck with msata SSDs and various adapters. A while back I went on a bit of a shopping spree on eBay and bought various sizes from 16 to 128GB, and they've all worked great. I haven't done benchmarks though, so I don't have and stats, but they all seem to perform pretty well.

Thanks, Phil!

woww Phil , win98 video again...💪.

Have had good experiences with the KingWin SATAIDE adapters ($15 on Amazon) lately with my Pentium 120 dos/win98 box, no fuss and no compatibility problems encountered yet.

How do you enable DMA mode during Windows installation? I always do that in device manager after installation.

Nice idea Phil.

Welcome to Phil's day 😁Good job

This is a great in-depth guide on using SD cards for retro PCs. I've seem many creators go the SD card route but not fully explaining the how or why. But there's a part that really niggles me, 07:57 - using a RAM Disk for the pagefile. So, using RAM to have a pagefile should you run out of RAM? Very counter intuitive. If one would need to use a RAM disk for the pagefile, I'd suggest doubling the RAM in the machine and use that extra RAM for the pagefile, also make sure you have far more RAM than you'd likely ever use.

nice test, thank you!

glad to see another vid from ya, but i would be scared for my life to use a SD Memory card for a Windows 98 Retro gaming PC especially if i wanna run intensive Windows 98 Era games

I've been using a SATA SSD with an IDE adapter in my build. Works great!

Thanks for your sharing

Im using a 4x Compact Flash Raid Adapter Sil0680 to pci for my athlon64 win98se machine, is good that it sees it as a scsi adapter and you get to free the ide channels but is not easy to find fast cf cards which have to be bootable and I don't get a lot of speed, there are some cf to sd adapters but I have not tested them yet (was supposed to be a cheap solution ) Good work👍

Great test. Got a 128GB SSD for cheap with a startech adapter and things are just a breeze. W98 feels as snappy as more modern OS (for the most part)

I'm using a Samsung HM160HC 2,5" notebook IDE drive in a SS7 board (mostly for DOS though). A relatively late PATA drive which for some reason can still be bought new. Only needs a cheap 3,5" to 2,5" IDE cable adapter, it's very quiet and relatively fast. It's 160GB therefore may need some workarounds with older boards.

I like ur install benchmark. Much better than read/write numbers in crystal diskmark or the like.

Had an Olivetti Echos P75 laptop once. 75 MHz, 24 MB RAM and a Compact Flash card in a passive IDECF adapter (CF uses already IDE internally). It boosted the machine so hard (only ATA33 but the awesome response time thanks to the CF card

I have a slightly different use case but similar. I tried using SD, microSD, CompactFlash, SSD and m.2 drives with SATA and IDE to SATA Adapters about Five years ago to replace the IDE drives in DVD/HDD Recorders. Found the same results as you. But settled on m.2 SATA to IDE combos. The IDE to SATA adapters are varied and unstable. Sometimes 8051/China (SinTech) based ones work, sometimes only Marvell (StarTech). But mostly Marvell they also emulate ODD (Optical Disk Drive) IDE commands which some systems need depending on use case. And Hard or Soft Primary/Secondary support or emulation is needed depending on the system. This was also explored by the Rovi/TiVo Community several years back on their Forums, but they found the same thing.. no (one) IDE to SATA Adapter chip works for all cases.. and m.2 wasn't an option back in those days... I carried m.2 for TiVO research forward and it works. But not all m.2 are equal.. there are NVMe and mSata m.2 devices. NVMe is gaining steam as its faster and more often bootable on new UEFI systems. mSata works with SATA to IDE adapters but is becoming less available. Like CompactFlash/Lexar it may be gone or rare in a few years. Vogons and some other forums have a few people working on ODD replacements.. which work off microSD (or) high speed USB/Flash drives with controllers.. like the Corsairs.. and using ext32 "image" files.. but so far only tattieboogle has a working proof of concept that looks extensible.. its expensive and has an IDE debugger.. for collecting data and extending the IDE command set it supports. Using high speed USB Flash with an IDE adapter looks long term more sustainable.. and its much faster.. but its not quite here yet.. and there aren't really any viable solutions yet. IDE Disk on Chip is an ancient nvram approach but not very scalable. Some ancient CNC Machines still rely on a Russian IDE disk emulation disk on a card, but it doesn't look to be cheap enough or widely available. Software IDE bus emulation is only just becoming possible outside the realm of bespoken glue logic FPGA arrays. Building discrete IDE bus chip circuits isn't very appealing to mass production efforts by low volume producers. The situation is "changing" but very slowly.. there isn't a large market for this stuff and its mostly Retro/Archeologists and Retro/gamers pursuing the options.. and oddballs like me.. into Retro DVD/HDD capture and support. At onetime I thought ATA over Ethernet, might be the way forward, a network card with a ROM extension that a board could use to boot from because it looks like an IDE device, that boots from a Network shared Blob.. bit like iSCSI that technology wasn't generic enough for many scenarios.. it was a bit specific and brittle as a general solution.. and I had to abandon it. AoE cards are much rarer these days.. but perhaps someday they will come back with VDHI and software emulation in silicon.

I am in my 40's and I find this video to be very interesting and informative and entertaining. I am a hobby PC builder myself.

I am actually planning to build Over powered retro gaming pc For older titles and get the 2000ish Gaming experience (running older things on windows 10 or 11 is a pain) & This video was actually helpful...!!!

Hello Phil, interesting movie as always, Greetings! :)

I use an SD-to-IDE adapter on a Mac Mini G4 as well as a P3 build and i've been pretty happy with this configuration. I have it set up so I can easily swap out cards to change operating systems or, in the case of the P3, writing files from my primary PC. I also have a 256 GB SSD in a P4 with native SATA ports that I use for moderately higher spec 98/XP era games.

I wonder how this compares to CF cards

For older mobos (386/486) connecting anything larger than 500MB prevents POST altogether. E.g. connect a CF2IDE adapter, and use 256MB CF card, works. Use 512MB CF card, black screen. I even used 256MB SD card via SD2CF card adapter inserted into the CF2IDE, and that also results in a black screen.

Really nice video. I would like to see if something ''exotic'' is possible and how fast (or slow it is) like windows 98 with memory card type like : memory stick, CFCard, smartmedia, mmc or uhccard, compact flash etc 😊 maybe my commentary is really dumb and all of that are impossible but i think it would be a funny experiment

I use all 3: The HDD is just my last resort backup, the sd card is my main backup and the SSD is the main storage i regularly use. However on my dedicated DOS machine, i use Compact Flash cards. And that is something i would like to mention, because i saw someone perform a similiar experiment on one of his computers and the CF card was the fastest, compared to SD card and HDD. However the Compact Flash cards are more expensive than SD cards.

I have tried using SD cards in my builds. They work okay for installation and some casual use, but I had some problems with longevity- inevitably, the data would either become corrupt or very slow. I wonder how much of this has to do with the adapter I was using (since I don't have SATA, I have to adapt to IDE.) Only SLC CF has worked consistently enough to date as far as flash storage goes. Controllers and drivers just don't know how to handle flash storage well.

I'm rocking those cheap Msata to ide adapters in my old toshibas. Quite handy as you can still find smaller SSD's. So far it has been good. I dual boot Windows 95 and Windows 2000. It's a Satellite 4015CDT, the factory drive was really slow and loud (also was dieing)

Very cool video Phil! How about doing the same thing with Windows XP? I'm attempting to do a fresh XP install onto a SSD for the first time, a lot of "pot holes" looming!

If I had a retro PC I would likely use a SATA to IDE drive. SD and CF cards are cool in situations, but I think that the r/w life of the SSD would be beneficial as I assume I would be using it often and for many years.

It works! Thanks a lot.

I was going to comment on wanting to see a comparison including 2.5" IDE to M.2 SATA or mSATA adapters, but you mentioned that while I was typing, so instead I typed a longer message on what I was going to type. Anyway, in my Pentium III machine running Windows 2000, I use an IDE to CF adapter, in which I have an adapter to use SD cards instead of CF, and then another to use micro-SD (yeah, three adapters between the motherboard and actual storage device). Wear leveling isn't a huge issue there as it's not used all that much, I wanted the option to simply swap out the card for one with another OS (the "CF" card sticks out from a PCI slot), and SD cards (micro or not) are easier to find than CF ones. In some other machines that use 2.5" IDE drives, I use 2.5" IDE to M.2 SATA adapters.

Great video sir! I bought all of the "3" different kinds of msata to ide adapters off of amazon and stick to ableconn adapters because they emulate 16 sector transfers with dma150 something and the other 2, black and white plastic boxes only emulate 2 sectors. Most would say it's not worth the high price of the ableconn but I like the small improvement it makes. Now I have like 15 of them and they are loaded with transcend 64gb msata ssds because they still make them new, otherwise I would get Samsung. I went with msata over m.2 because m.2 drives supposedly blank themselves with the bad power from old psu's but mainly the prices are higher and it's a lot more research to find models with high random Io controllers. Windows and dos only see what the bios can handle and the rest I use for a custom tiny windows XP to backup the fat16/32 partitions. Thanks!

I've been using a Startech 35BAYCF2IDE for swapping between Compact Flash cards, but I've been thinking of swapping to a IcyDock MB521SP-B so I can hotswap between 2.5" SSDs instead. They're cheap enough these days, but I haven't committed.

I use a startech compact flash to ide adapter with a 16GB CF card. Compact flash already uses the IDE standard so the circuitry is simple, the controller is on the card instead of the adapter, and you get most of the speed out of your cards. Greatly prefer them over using SD cards or sata drives in general in retro builds. The trick is to use an industrial compact flash card. They're designed with much higher endurance over typical cheap consumer ones and can identify as a fixed disk so it presents itself no differently than an actual HDD. You just get all the benefits of zero seek time, much higher reliability, and the like. Downside is the cost. There are some consumer ones that do work (atm I'm using a verbatim in the DOS rig that I had laying around) but you're rolling the dice on it.

I always disabled swapfile in Win98 (and 3.1, W95, WME, and sometimes XP, all ran perfectly stable). Absolutely NO stability issues; my everyday Win98 system crashed exactly once in ten years, when Mozilla 1.0 tried to directly access the modem (yes, really), and they were rebooted rarely to never. The only issue is if some program assumes low RAM and refuses to run if it doesn't find a swapfile, and I only saw that once, with a photo editing app. In fact, performance improved significantly in that era of slow mechanical HDs.

Thanks much for this. Any chance you could do an SD card vs equivalent compactflash comparison? CF is native IDE interface so I wonder if better performance because of that.

I’ve still got loads of old IDE hard drives (from 40MB to 500GB) so I’m yet to try anything else, BUT I’ve always fancied trying a CF to IDE adapter 🤔

This is amazing! 👍👍

I'd like to see you also benchmark CompactFlash cards. I recently built a retro-PC for Windows 98 and Windows XP. I tried SATA SSD's but it didn't seem very reliable so I switched to a removable CF-IDE adapter hanging out of the back of the PC. I physically switch cards instead of trying to dual boot from one card. CF cards are still available. My cards were leftovers from my Canon DSLR's.

On a side-note, they do sell laptops that are equipped with SD storage. If you look in task manager (windows 10 2004+), it shows it as a "SD", not SSD or HDD. Usually HP stream laptops and the like with 4gb memory and slow celeron/pentium (atom based) cpu. I tried to clone the customer's old hdd from their previous laptop to it...it couldn't even do it! I told her to send it back. As far as setting up win98 boxes at work for customers...I stick with IDE hard drives, I have a collection. I'd go straight for CF if I couldn't get an IDE hard drive, I don't like SD storage it has slow writing.

A great video and novel approach, but I feel this benchmark skews in favour of write speeds a little too much. An SD card will likely be far better at random seek reads than a physical disk.

One theory I have about HDDs is they got shipped around lately, exposing them to shocks/damage in-transit. Also WD Caviar might be more reliable than Seagate 7200.7 series. Great work as always!

thanks for the great comparison. I usually use ssd or ide hdd.

The installation of W98 just give you a good idea of speed transfert. But the use is something else. In my case I used an Amd 5x86 on a 486DX4-VLB motherboard with and without an IDE controler with 16mb of Cache Ram, after some Power Cycles/Reset, I have data corruption on SD/CF cards but never with HDD whatever the FSB/CPU/ISA bus speed. It happen faster when the IDE controler doesn't have ram cache.

Also have 4 standard size 128GB mSATA harddrives for testing different systems on the way although the Slim computer I am getting is made for Half size, there exist adapters to get around that issue and it is much cheaper then to buy the Half Sizes which only goes up to 512GB as well. So... Looking around and sorting out my things. Hope my first Slim unit will be able to do Windows 2000 pro.

I'm also using SD cards in 486 and K6-III systems with that "Sintechi SD to IDE" since @Philscomputerlab intrduced them in a video back then. But I guess these very old CPUs/Motherboards (lacking even UDMA33) won't profit much from using a SSD.

I have the exact SD card to ide adapter and have used it with several different builds including athlon xp, 64 and core 2 quad builds and I would say there good enough for something 9x based however they show there limitations under xp and in some cases have been less stable than a traditional ide drive. Personally I would use a sata based ssd over the SD adapter as your limited by the sd standard, I have Also heard compact flash is a very good solution but then your limited to storage space and haven't tried this personally but from what I've been told it performs better due to being natively ide based.

I'd say the SSD would be the way to go simply because its the cheapest option with the least hassle these days. I've been refurbing a bunch of old C2D and C2Q machines and figured the SSD would be the "gotcha" but it was actually cheaper than anything else, even DDR2 RAM cost more than 120Gb SSDs which I was grabbing all day for $10-$12. Considering those $10 drives were saturating a SATA 1 interface on the slower IDE I'm sure it would max it out and if you are only formatting to 20-30Gb you are going to have so much free space for wear leveling I seriously doubt you'll ever be able to wear it out whereas as you said the SD cards really need host logic that old OSes just don't have.

Yeah I too would like to see Compact Flash in the next head-to-head.

This is awesome!

@PhilsComputerLab I have a permanent retro build, built an HP T5710 thin client with a PCI Voodoo3 3000 on top that uses a laptop PATA interface. I have Windows 98SE running off of a 16GB SDHC card & honestly it’s plenty fast enough to get the job done. Having said that back in the day I had Win98 running off of a 3GB hard drive with a 300MHz Cyrix CPU that I upgraded with an 8GB HDD & in comparison this crummy thin client seems so much faster. 😄

Great video. My question is: I'm running on old Pentium II PC with a 6.4 GB HDD at the moment. Is there something to worry about disk sizes? Another question: Is it better to use SD cards (much more common) or CompactFlash? Is there a big difference between these systems?

Good comparison. I still stick to my Adaptec U160 Controller plus 74gig SCSI Disk. The 10000rpm SCSI disk is not as loud as you might think but fast as hell.

The controller on the IDE-SD adapter needs to support those higher speed grades and communication methods - may be worth looking at the chip datasheet to figure what's the maximum supported. Also, you should look at buying some IDE SSDs - Transcend makes some, Apacer makes some, they were available in 16/32/64 GB ... also there's some old 8 / 16 GB ide SSDs pulled from thin clients on e bay, with low write counts.

How do you install onto an SSD and are there any limitations or pitfalls to look out for?

Maybe you are looking for a CF card for better compatibility. The CF interface is native IDE using its native UDMA commands. No latency caused by strange adapters in between. The adapters to 40 pin IDE are passive without controller chip(s)

Hi. I have 2GB disk-on-module in pata. Will it be enough for win 98 instalation? What can You recommend instead of pata 1,8" harddrive in my toshiba R100?

If I ever get a 386 class, Pentium era machine for DOS and 9x gaming I'll be definitely getting one of those SD2IDE cards

I recently bought an 80GB Spinpoint P80 (P series 7200RPM, V series 5400RPM) as my 80GB Barracuda 7200.9 and late 80GB WD800BB failed, leaving me with my slower 80GB ATAIV (which I typically pair with an OEM 20GB ATAIV). My experience with it has been fantastic, as Windows ME boots as fast as it does on 2x 200GB SATA 7200.7 in RAID 0. Personally in my retro PC I'll be using HDD as long as I can get them. With laptops however of a similar age, they are getting mSATA or m.2 SATA SSD within a 2.5" IDE converter enclosure - 64 and 128GB are good sizes. Edit: The P80's peak read/write rate is fast enough to actually exceed ATA-100

Hi Phil, there are 2 versions of the 40gb Seagate Barracuda. The one you are using is the IDE version, but there was a SATA version, same model number, just ending with AS instead of A. Do you think that there would be any throughput penalties if using a SATA-IDE adaptor (like the Startech for example) with the SATA version of the Barracuda?

Have you tried compact flash? It’s directly IDE compatible with a cheap passive pass through pin to pin board adapter and the extreme pro cards are 160 MB/s!

good video, but i miss a SATA mechanical, mainly a WD Velociraptor they are awsome

Maybe I need to try SD cards in my Win98 machine. I've been using industrial CF cards with great success for several years.

I went with SSD for 98se/XP because of Druaga1 and dank memes.

I have just ordered 2 different SD micro for mSATA... But I do wonder if the issue with speed might be the bridge. I did wonder if there are any standard SD's bridges to mSATA that might be able to better with a SD with Micro but I would need to test that.

I'm curious how crucial it is to have a CD audio connector from your disc drive to your sound card for Win98. If you don't need it for more 'modern' games you could probably put together a really nice anachronistic machine with a pure SATA SSD / DVD drive setup. Edit: Cool, sounds like it is indeed possible. Thanks for the responses.