Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom\u2019s Hardware. Although he loves everything that\u2019s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-13/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Zhiye Liu News Editor, RAM Reviewer & SSD Technician Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
BFG-9000 I should point out that by 1990s they mean 1998 because that was the year 66MHz PCI bus became available 133MB/s 33MHz PCI bus arrived for 486 in 1992 with the 420TX chipset but could not be maxed out until the arrival of SDRAM, considering that FPM or EDO asynchronous main system memory topped out ~80MB/s But then the maximum install size of Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was only 14.5MB , so Windows was snappy even without a SSD Reply
palladin9479 You can achieve this without needing a NVME drive or a PCIe to PCI adapter. Just get one of the older SATA to PCI cards like the Promise TX2 and plug a SATA SSD into it. SATA 1.0 was already eclipsing the ~133MB/s bandwidth of the regular 33mhz PCI bus and SATA2 shot past the rare 66mhz variety. Any SATA SSD would easily hit those numbers nowadays, which is why we all switched to NVMe in the first place. Reply
jeremyj_83 palladin9479 said: You can achieve this without needing a NVME drive or a PCIe to PCI adapter. Just get one of the older SATA to PCI cards like the Promise TX2 and plug a SATA SSD into it. SATA 1.0 was already eclipsing the ~133MB/s bandwidth of the regular 33mhz PCI bus and SATA2 shot past the rare 66mhz variety. Any SATA SSD would easily hit those numbers nowadays, which is why we all switched to NVMe in the first place. Using SATA you could even see how much speed you could get on the IDE channel with a SATA > IDE adapter. Reply
ezst036 palladin9479 said: You can achieve this without needing a NVME drive or a PCIe to PCI adapter. Just get one of the older SATA to PCI cards like the Promise TX2 and plug a SATA SSD into it. SATA 1.0 was already eclipsing the ~133MB/s bandwidth of the regular 33mhz PCI bus and SATA2 shot past the rare 66mhz variety. Any SATA SSD would easily hit those numbers nowadays, which is why we all switched to NVMe in the first place. I had an SATA-adapted SSD on my primary system back in the day before SSDs were super common. It was amazing for the time. As an upgrade it was better than pretty much every CPU or RAM upgrade I had ever done. Couldn't believe the difference. Reply
spaceminions It'd be interesting to see how the random read latency compares with each of the mentioned options, assuming the SSDs themselves were all more than capable. I can also mention that there are/were CF memory cards for cameras which easily convert to IDE, before they made CF-express and XQD and similar which were PCIE based. And now with pcie in microsd cards, it could be interesting to see side by side just how far we've come in storage – a 3.5 inch drive working as hard as it can and a little card smaller than a dime storing more, faster. Reply
palladin9479 ezst036 said: I had an SATA-adapted SSD on my primary system back in the day before SSDs were super common. It was amazing for the time. As an upgrade it was better than pretty much every CPU or RAM upgrade I had ever done. Couldn't believe the difference. I have a couple of retro PC's and use a bunch of Startech SATA to IDE adapters to connect SATA DVDRW's and 120GB SATA SSD's to them. One of of them I used a Promise FastTrak S150 TX2 Plus and it instantly saturated the PCI bus. This was because that system only did UDMA for 33MB/s for it's onboard IDE and that card provided a UDMA6 interface which is the exact same bandwidth as the PCI Bus. This way I can get that performance in DOS / Win98SE. Yes it's silly fast disk access. Reply
hwertz My parents in fact had a 486 with an Intel Saturn chipset (PCI). CL5434 VGA (which only stands out because it's one of the controllers that virtualization products implement). I will say. I had a socket 7 board with a Intel 430VX that would ROUTINELY top 100MB/sec off my HDD (and I had PC133 memory so even swapping wasn't a big slow down.). I suppose due to having a single core, and not as fast, I didn't have applications generate random I/O (and drop HDD performance to like 1MB/sec) back then as can easily happen now fairly easily. I like that this nvme solution works though (might be more useful as SATA SSDs go off the market over time.) Also I wonder why the writes were only 58MB/sec? Not that it matters really. Reply
King_V This might be kind of neat for one of my ancient systems because I have a 128GB NVMe SSD lying around somewhere. It's read speeds are modest by today's standards, rated at up to 1700MB/s, and the write speeds are even more modest, topping out at 450MB/s. Though, come to think of it, I also have a 128GB SATA 2.5" SSD as well. I wonder how nicely/poorly my Windows 98SE Lite install would work with either of these solutions? I also wonder if an RPi 3 or 4 has more than enough horsepower to emulate Win98, rather than having this ancient tower still lingering around. Reply
palladin9479 hwertz said: I will say. I had a socket 7 board with a Intel 430VX that would ROUTINELY top 100MB/sec off my HDD (and I had PC133 memory so even swapping wasn't a big slow down.). I suppose due to having a single core, and not as fast, I didn't have applications generate random I/O (and drop HDD performance to like 1MB/sec) back then as can easily happen now fairly easily. I like that this nvme solution works though (might be more useful as SATA SSDs go off the market over time.) The 430VX only supported UMDA/33, so 33MB's is the maximum the physical interface could handle, this was before the 80-pin IDE cables came out. If you experienced 100MB/s then it was purely from memory read cache. PC-133 ran at 1064MB/s, so it's entirely possible on Windows 2000 / XP. Reply
hwertz King_V said: …. I also wonder if an RPi 3 or 4 has more than enough horsepower to emulate Win98, rather than having this ancient tower still lingering around. Perhaps? Reportedly (and this report was from about 5 years ago so I expect the emulators may be a tad faster now, since there's more interest in fast x86-on-ARM of late…) a Pi3 was running x86 emulation about dead even with a 486DX2-66. (Although they then said to not bother running Win98 on it — despite people absolutely running Win95 on 486s back in the day, and Win98 not really being any heavier than Win95. That said I think they were looking into gaming on it, running Win98-era 3D games on a 486 might have been a bit ambitious…) They did note benchmarks showed the VGA emulation easily meets and exceeds 90s-era real world performance, so it's really just the CPU emulation being a bottleneck. Pi4 is about twice the speed of a Pi 3. Would Win98 run? Yeah, I think so. Will you get the performance you want? If you have (as is common with retro gamers) some top shelf for the era system like a Pentium II 400, or even a Pentium 3, the Pi won't be that fast (…probably, I assume box86 and box64 have not gotten a close to 10x speedup compared to 5 or 6 years ago). If your retro system is like a 486 or a Pentium 90 or something it may keep up nicely. Plan B would be to use box86/box64 and run Windows 9x-era stuff in (an x86/x86-64 version of) Wine. Wine does still have support for this stuff (including 16-bit executables) that are long gone in real Windows. Or FEX (which is for running x86/x86-64 stuff on ARM — this focuses on newer games so I don't know for sure if it maintains compatibility for 16-bit executables etc., but most likely it does.) Not as retro as a full Windows 98 environment, but if your goal is just to enjoy the games and applications that may prove effective. Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/modern-nvme-ssd-meets-vintage-pci-slot-in-quirky-experiment-m-2-drive-shows-storage-speeds-worth-dying-for-back-in-the-90s#main
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