Windows 98 on SSD

[Retro6]

I'm into building retro gaming PC's although I'm no expert its something that I really enjoy but with IDE mechanical drives becoming harder to find it presents a challenge.

I've seen a lot of videos of people installing Windows 98 "Second Edition" to SSD (often SATA) but fail to explain how it all works. I'm a bit confused... My current understanding is that Windows 98 doesn't support solid state drives and although Windows 98 installations will often go smoothly after a while there will be major issues with the OS and blue screens.

Is there a work around that I'm missing? or is Installing Windows 98 to a solid state drive completely pointless?

Thanks.

 

[Retro6]

Thanks for the info. From my research some solid state drives are better than others for this purpose. I believe the limit for Windows 98 is 120 GB but I normally only use a maximum of 40GB for Win98. I knew about the defragment. I have an 32GB and 16 GB SSD somewhere I will make a partition before installing win98 for 25% of the SSD unpartitioned.. I did try installing win98 to an SD card once via a IDE to SD card adapter which worked for a short time but I understand SD are not really appropriate for this purpose and CF cards are better suited. I may also have a miniSSD somewhere. I will see if there are some more ways to improve things a bit more in regards to the swapfile to minimize writes.

 

[Retro6]

Anybody remember people using SSD's on Windows XP?

I remember laptops being sold that were running Windows XP that had SSD. Windows XP was never designed to run on SSD and had no TRIM but they could be set up in a way where the SSD would be perfectly fine from wearing out quickly.

I read that some SSD's deal with the dater themselves via there controller. Having TRIM support built into the controller, not needing an operating system to support TRIM. Crucial mention this on there website.

Somebody suggested that to use Windows Me or Win 7 setup disk and Diskpart to set up partitions on ssd for older systems (Shift +F10 during setup) to access shell, then run diskpart. Need to do it this way or the 4k blocks on ssd are not format aligned with physical layout of cells. With 95/98/xp/2000 fdisk puts 4k blocks starting at any physical point in 4k cell block on ssd, causes multiple overlapping disk writes to multiple overlapping 4k blocks on the ssd to change data (imagine replacing a tile on a roof, having to remove lots of tiles around the broken one to get to the one you want to replace), wearing out the ssd really fast. Once partitions are set up using ME/7 you can format in 98 no problem.

There is a lot of conflicting information out there... I don't mind ruining an SSD conducting an experiment with Windows 98 installed to SSD some people say they have done it and have been using the the same SSD for years running Windows 98.