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A tiny 0.5MB SmartMedia card wins the Small Capacity Memory Card Championship (Japan) — 2KB Casio battery-backed RAM card lost due to a technicality

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The Small Capacity Memory Card Championship (Japan), in which participants submitted their smallest memory cards, has been a tightly run race, but now the results are in. The smallest memory card found by the retro-computer-loving followers of X68PRO-HD on X was a 0.5MB SmartMedia card. While entrants such as the 1.44MB Flash FDD stick and Casio 2KB battery-backed RAM card didn’t make the cut (they didn’t quite fit the category), we were intrigued to see them.

Without further ado, the full list of tiny-capacity winners was as follows (machine translation):

SD card: 8MB (SD, miniSD, microSD)

MMC card: 4MB

CF card: 2MB

Memory Stick: 4MB

SmartMedia card: 512KB (5V) / 2MB (3.3V)

xD-Picture Card: 16MB

PCMCIA card: 10MB / 2KB (SRAM)

If I were to join in this low-capacity competition, the best entrant from my drawers of detritus would be the 1GB xD-Picture card I found (see top picture). I also remember spending far too much on a 64MB CF card (and PCMCIA adaptor) back when digital cameras were cutting-edge tech objects of desire. Even that, though, seems massive compared to the 0.5MB SmartMedia card found by X68PRO-HD and their social media acquaintances.

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