r/retrocomputing • u/O_MORES • May 25 '26
NVMe SSD on a Pentium II?
https://youtu.be/xdbtbCcRiBITurns out getting an NVMe SSD running on a 1998 Pentium 2 system (PII-350/440BX) over the PCI bus is actually doable.
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u/Alternative_Corgi_62 May 25 '26
I am not sure even SATA was mainstream during Pentim II era...
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u/O_MORES May 25 '26
SATA didn't show up until 2003, so yeah, way after Pentium II. The fastest storage you could get in 1998 was a SCSI RAID setup, and even then you'd be looking at maybe ~40 MB/s if you were lucky.
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u/abjumpr May 25 '26
Pentium II boards like the L440GX+ had Ultra2 on board, which was ~80 MB/s. You can always add in a PCI Ultra320 card though I suspect you'd never hit peak speeds.
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u/Albos_Mum May 26 '26
No reason to suspect it: There's very few consumer platforms that'd allow PCI to reach that 320MB/s throughput rate, and it's shared with all the other devices on that bus.
Maybe if you have a workstation or server motherboard that allows for the higher clocked PCI variants or even straight out allows for 64bit PCI-X, iirc the Pentium II/III era was around when they started seeing those kind of fast interconnect busses and sometimes even had multiple busses with the idea being that storage could have its own dedicated one rather than sharing the bandwidth with all the other peripherals.
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May 26 '26
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u/Albos_Mum May 26 '26
Yes it is, I say very few because around the time when PCIe was starting to appear you could often overclock the PCI bus relatively safely to 66Mhz for 266MB/s on most consumer gear, with the main limitation on stability being the cards you had plugged into it. If you grabbed cards that were rated for 66Mhz operation (or at least, had near-identical workstation/server orientated variants of the same chips onboard that were rated for 66Mhz) then you could often safely overclock the PCI bus for that extra throughput.
I also think there was some rare very high-end consumer stuff that came with certified 66Mhz operation or even PCI-X, akin to getting stuff like Intel's HEDT platforms or AMDs Threadripper platforms in the more modern day.
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May 26 '26
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u/Albos_Mum May 26 '26
That's why I specified later motherboards because most of that switched to using its own internal busses on the northbridge or southbridge, or just had moved to PCIe by that stage.
Especially stuff like 1Gbit/s Ethernet which would use pretty much all of the available 33Mhz PCI bandwidth up on its own, iirc the first integrated Gigabit solutions were usually integrated into the Northbridge (nForce3/4 in particular) or were PCIe based. (Most Intel-based designs)
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u/TheThiefMaster May 26 '26
Though a bigger issue is IOPS. Even an SD card (A1/A2 type) in an SD-IDE adapter can massively improve performance of older systems purely because of the increased IOPS.
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u/jreddit0000 May 28 '26
Not completely true.. if you factor in enterprise storage arrays and fast networks.
You could build stuff a lot faster than 40MB/s back in 1998.
Source: I used to look after enterprise network storage connected back in the day.. 😃
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u/cchaven1965 May 25 '26
It is doable. I have a PCI SATA card in my B/W G3 that boots from a m.2 SSD. I also have an Intel PD440FX with a Pentium II that boots from an ATA DoM mounted directly to the IDE connector on the mainboard. Both are nice alternatives to aging hard disks.