ssd in ms-dos pc...?

[Ashleyyyy]

hello,

 

i want to put an ssd in my ms-dos pc. a really small one. it's a pentium mmx machine with 16 mb ram.

i want to do this because all of the old harddrives that i have are breaking, and i want to put something more reliable in. 

it will be running Windows 95, but will be booting to Dos 95% of the time.

 

is it possible to to this? and with what adaptors? will the machine even recognise it?

[ProjectBox153]

While you could do that (if you found an IDE SSD of a small enough capacity), you'd be wasting your money. I'd just get a lot of about 5 3.5" IDE mechanical drives off of eBay or somewhere. You can get them really cheaply these days, and if you make backups, there's no issue if one dies.

[Ashleyyyy]

4 hours ago, Jamiec1130 said:

While you could do that (if you found an IDE SSD of a small enough capacity), you'd be wasting your money. I'd just get a lot of about 5 3.5" IDE mechanical drives off of eBay or somewhere. You can get them really cheaply these days, and if you make backups, there's no issue if one dies.

making a bootable backup of windows 95 is difficult. and i collect these old machines, so if i have to replace a harddrive once every month, it's annoying. and yes, i use these machines daily. 

[ProjectBox153]

34 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

making a bootable backup of windows 95 is difficult. and i collect these old machines, so if i have to replace a harddrive once every month, it's annoying. and yes, i use these machines daily. 

I'd just recommend getting a lot of mechanical drives. I have some from the mid 90's that still work fine, even after a lot of usage. 

[Ashleyyyy]

1 hour ago, Jamiec1130 said:

I'd just recommend getting a lot of mechanical drives. I have some from the mid 90's that still work fine, even after a lot of usage. 

you are lucky. mine are either not booting up properly, or making a really high whining noise that drives me absolutely insane. 

[AshleyAshes]

CompactFlash is electrically identical to the IDE interface, it just needs a passive pinout adaptor.  So with a simple CF to IDE adaptor, you can use a CF card natively on any system that supports IDE.  So to make it clear; CF cards are solid state IDE drives, they just have a different pinout.  Legacy systems have no problems interfacing with CF cards.

 

It's even a common modification on older arcade machine restorations, machines that used HDDs to store game data on, to make a new image on a CF card and install that, making a 20+ year old arcade machine solid state rather than relying on a mechanical HDD.

[ProjectBox153]

49 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

CompactFlash is electrically identical to the IDE interface, it just needs a passive pinout adaptor.  So with a simple CF to IDE adaptor, you can use a CF card natively on any system that supports IDE.  So to make it clear; CF cards are solid state IDE drives, they just have a different pinout.  Legacy systems have no problems interfacing with CF cards.

 

It's even a common modification on older arcade machine restorations, machines that used HDDs to store game data on, to make a new image on a CF card and install that, making a 20+ year old arcade machine solid state rather than relying on a mechanical HDD.

Man, can't believe I forgot about those. 

[Ashleyyyy]

1 hour ago, AshleyAshes said:

CompactFlash is electrically identical to the IDE interface, it just needs a passive pinout adaptor.  So with a simple CF to IDE adaptor, you can use a CF card natively on any system that supports IDE.  So to make it clear; CF cards are solid state IDE drives, they just have a different pinout.  Legacy systems have no problems interfacing with CF cards.

 

It's even a common modification on older arcade machine restorations, machines that used HDDs to store game data on, to make a new image on a CF card and install that, making a 20+ year old arcade machine solid state rather than relying on a mechanical HDD.

thank you! i will look into that!