They do. They were just not called SD back then, but MMC.

I have as small cards as 16MB.

Small SD cards do exist. You can find them as small as 128MB in old digital cameras (or eBay). Anything smaller will likely be MMC.

mpe wrote on 2020-02-02, 22:40:

They do. They were just not called SD back then, but MMC.

I have as small cards as 16MB.

Interesting, but it seems those are not easily available and prices seem more expensive than SD. I buy my 16GB cards from Amazon DE for 4.99 euro each and free shipping to Belgium. Guess Ill just make a partition and pretend the other gb's don't exist.

Small capacity SD cards did exist, I have a few miniSD and microSD cards that are 128MB and they work fine as a boot drive for a Raspberry Pi (the root fs is mounted over NFS). They're not available new any more, you could try asking someone with an old digital camera or MP3 player.

People like charging a mint for low-capacity memory cards on ebay, but they're there. I bought a 12MB memory stick for my Mavica camera, for like $20, but a 32GB MicroSD card is often less than half that. 😒

When you could go down to any corner store, pick up a SD card for a few dollars and partition as you see fit - why bother looking for a manky old heavily used SD card?

I've seen 16, 32 and 64 Mb SD cards!
They can be found inside old Cameras. Go to a local flea market and look inside early 2000 cameras, you'll find many of them.

industrial cards can be had with 128, 256 and 512MB no problem, they're widely available, but they are not going to be cheaper than consumer 16GB cards :p but they do have the advantage of using SLC memory usually.

mpe wrote on 2020-02-02, 22:40:

They do. They were just not called SD back then, but MMC.

That's not really correct. MMC and SD are two different things with even different physical dimensions. It's just that early SD card slots were made backwards compatible with MMC, just like a DVD drive is backwards compatible with CDs.

SD cards started at 8 MB. Finding ones that small that are not written to death already could be quite hard, though. Smallest cards that are still common are 128 MB.

I found really old cards (below 1GB) to - most of the times - be incompatible with adapters a la SD2IDE, as their transfer speed is actually too slow to substitute for IDE transfers. The drive controller on my 386SX-16 luggable as well as on the 386-SX20 IBM PS/2 laptop hung up with "Sector not found" here and there, which could only be solved by using faster cards. Just a FYI.