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.

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!

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.

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. 🤞🤞

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.

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!

I love the adapter in my retro PC, definitely one of the better purchases I made for it.

This confirms my preference for sata SSDs for win98 machines.

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

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.

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.

Like. Windows 98 hardware and software is very interesting.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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