External hard drive

Victor

I'm thinking of getting an external hard drive as my own is getting quite full. While stable, who knows how long more the machines has (Win98SE, PII 500, 96MB RAM), so I'm thinking external rather than internal.

The machine has two USB slots (presumably rather early USB 1). Peats were suggesting I get a PCI USB card to improve tranfer speeds. Is this necessary?

Portability, would be nice, but not essential.

The suggested cost is 20 euro for the card and 150 euro for the dive (X hundred GB).

SeanW

In a word, yes.

Early USB speeds are p1ss slow. It would drive you mental.

What I'd suggest is buying an internal drive (make sure it's an IDE not SATA), and use it for data storage, documents etc. Then, when you replace the computer, move the hard drive over to the new computer and all your documents, music and stuff will be available there.

Ruu_Old

If you wanted to go the PCI USB 2 card route that would be fine and go for one of the Western Digital My Book range (Komplett have them). Cheap for the storage you get and they work great, I have two of them.

zilog_jones

SeanW wrote:

Early USB speeds are p1ss slow. It would drive you mental.

Indeed. USB1.1 is 12Mb/s (1.5MByte/s), compared to USB2 which is theoretically 480Mb/s (60MByte/s), which is close to the physical limitations of typical modern hard disks.

What I'd suggest is buying an internal drive (make sure it's an IDE not SATA), and use it for data storage, documents etc. Then, when you replace the computer, move the hard drive over to the new computer and all your documents, music and stuff will be available there.

I dunno about that - with such an old PC (especially if the BIOS wasn't well supported), it's quite possible it has a pretty low limit to what size hard disks it can take - possibly 32GB, but it most certainly won't be able to handle anything bigger than 128GB (or 137GB or whatever it is).

If you want to get an internal HDD you'd be best off just buying a PCI SATA controller card and a new disk.

Also, if you got some more RAM (128MB, preferably >256) that PC would be able to take Windows 2000 (or possibly even XP) comfortably. I wouldn't recommend using an OS that is no longer supported like 98 (not to mention it's gammy in comparison).

quad_red

Victor wrote:

The suggested cost is 20 euro for the card and 150 euro for the dive (X hundred GB).

€170 to salvage a lost cause? (sorry).

Maybe you'd be better off getting a cheap XP capable machine second hand off adverts?

You'd pick up a complete machine well able to run XP and with a far bigger HD* for not 250/300 quid (especially as you have a monitor, keyboard etc. already)


*probably not 250gig though. But if you're surviving on a tiny HD this far you're unlikely to need 250gigs.

obrienb

AFAIK Win98 doesn't have USB2.0 support... I'm open to correction but you should definately check that before rushing out and buying a huge HDD that will take you forever to transfer over a couple of G's.

8T8

Win98SE supports USB2 through a third party driver - usually comes on the CD with the device.

Not sure about the original Win98 though..

Victor

quad_red wrote:

€170 to salvage a lost cause? (sorry).

No, its not a lost cause yet, but when it is I want a back up.

The machine is basicly sound, only had one Win98SE reinstall over the years and hasn't spent much time on the net, so it hasn't been exposed to a lot of malware.

Plus there are other plans.

Ruu_Old

8T8 wrote:

Win98SE supports USB2 through a third party driver - usually comes on the CD with the device.

Not sure about the original Win98 though..

Very tricky, hard to get third party drivers for the first edition these days and even then it still didn't work properly (for me anyway).