Question Can a CPU bottleneck a drive's speed?

[Elia1995]

Hello, I'm on my quest of building retrocomputers and in a Pentium II 233MHz I put an SSD with a SATA to IDE adapter and installed Windows 98SE on it.
The difference in loading times is noticeable compared to a SCSI HDD I was previously using in that build (now I put OS/2 on that drive), but I also noticed that copying files or even installing games from within the SSD is a lot slower than how it should be, so I was wondering, is it possible that the CPU can affect the writing/reading speeds of the SSD, or the adapter kinda limits it?
Of course an SSD in a retro build isn't the ideal way to go and it's "unfitting", but I like experimenting with hardware, especially making retro-modern Frankensteins like that 😅

 

[Shmee]

Yeah the nforce4 board I have works well enough with a Crucial 128GB SSD, I think either an M500 or M550. But this is with Lubuntu. I set the SATA operating mode to RAID in the BIOS, as that should enable TRIM, as RAID is a subset of AHCI. Oddly enough, the only options in BIOS are RAID or IDE lol.

But I do tend to figure a VM might be worth trying.

 

[yottabit]

Fun thread. I've got a Pentium 60 MHz that I've had running both Win 95 SE2 and OS/2 Warp. Hard drive let go after one too many crackling popcorn sounding seeks. I went a different route and got a bootable PCI CompactFlash card reader and a lot of old Lexar 2 GB CF cards. The kind where you can swap out the card from the rear of the case. So in theory I'll be able to swap out images for Win95, NT, OS/2 etc. Still haven't gotten around to setting it up yet.

Never thought of using an IDE to SATA adaptor, forgot about those.

I've definitely seen cases of SSD bottlenecking by CPU or other interface limitations over the years, usually when upgrading aging hardware.

I still regret getting rid of my Pentium Pro 200 MHz workstation. 64 MB of RAM it had and I had set it up running Windows 2000

I've got a Toshiba laptop that was my grandfathers and subsequently my first hand me down laptop. Whopping 25 Mhz. First thing I did when I got it was run to local store and get a PCMCIA 3com modem so I could get online. I'e love to get it back online someday. I bought a PCMCIA ethernet card for it years ago that had drivers on a floppy but then I heard the belt inside the floppy drive snap

It actually isn't that hard to replace capacitors etc on some of this older hardware don't let people scare you off! Also despite all the talks of things that "should have failed by now" I have tons of 30 yr old electronics that still work just fine thanks very much. I've always associated cap failure with poor design/component selection or storage conditions than an age issue. I've had electronics only a few yrs old fail from cap issues

I will admit to using DOSBox from time to time now.

As I've been getting more into software dev as a hobby I'd like to mess with writing some software. I think it would be pretty funny to write or port something modern and anachronistic onto these old hardware. I found there's still a supported version of java runtime for Win95: https://www.java.com/en/download/help/win95.html

Can't believe there is still a support page for that !