I will clone my HDD before ...
Smart! This is the first thing I typically do when working on old equipment. I am using a Transcend 2.5" PATA SSD in mine...
I was thinking about trying a PATA SSD, but was reading on the Internet that it wouldn't make much difference on Win2k because it doesn't support the TRIM function among other things. A YouTube video showed the bootup time of a Win2k PC with a HDD, and after the drive was swapped with a SSD. The time was essentially the same, but you are saying there was a noticeable improvement in the VNA performance? Cheers.
I made no mention of any noticeable improvements in VNA performance. That said, I think on my one LeCroy DSO, after upgrading from 2k to XP, with and without the SSD, the boot times were a wash. The small amount I gained with the SSD, I lost with the OS. Still the time allowed to stabilize the equipment is much longer than they take to boot, so nothing to be gained there.
The reason I chose that particular drive was it supports many of the features not supported by these old OSs internally with it's firmware. While I was told by members on this forum about SSDs having a very short life (weeks) and lots of fine tuning of the settings required, I installed one where I imaged the drive with no changes what so ever. Basically I was trying to force the worse possible condition according to the experts to validate their claims. That was in 2015 and that drive is still in use today with the same setup.
PNA performance wise, I basically use it headless. In other words, I tend to do all the heavy lifting with an external PC. The first VNA I bought basically sent me down that path as it had no computer. So to make it work without the aid of a grease pen, using a PC was the only way to cal it or create Touchstone files..... The up side to that was it forced me to learn how the VNA worked and understand some of the math behind it. It also provided me with an appreciation for the real experts in this field, of which I am not.
Why use an SSD? I've lost mechanical drives in test equipment before and my choice of moving to SSDs was hopes of improving long term reliability. Verdicts still out on that one. That said I have an old 80s DSO that uses a 68k in a VME chassis. A relic. It uses an MFM drive. The Miniscribe drive was locked up, typical of that brand with their out gassing. I bought a used Seagate ST-225 and hacked it's hardware to mimic the Miniscribe drive. The PSOS OS they used only supported a couple of different drives. That old scope with it's hacked up unknown history drive has been in my possession for over 20 years now and is still in operation. So, there's that data point...