What the hell did people do with all the old flash memory cards?

It is something that has always frustrated me. You can see old digital cameras and other devices for sale in flea markets and thrift shops, and here and there. BUT you almost never see any with the memory card with them, and you never find any old memory cards here and there.

The normal answer would be “just go to wally world and get a memory card”

The problem comes from the fact that the older cameras and other devices can’t use the cards that are currently on the shelves. The smallest ones you can get any more are 4GB and larger. In many stores 8GB is the smallest one they have. Even a lot of relatively new cameras and other devices can’t use any SD cards over 2GB.

Some of the older cameras won’t even take 2GB SD cards. A lot of the older ones had limits of 256 or 512 MB cards. That size limit is especially true with old cameras that take compact flash cards. So when I see one for sale at the local goodwill or flea market and I don’t see a memory card in it, then I know anyone buying it will be buying a paperweight because they will not be able to buy a memory card to use with it without going through a very limited set of online retailers. A limited set that is rapidly dwindling.

Yet, I never see any old used memory cards for sale anywhere along with that electronic equipment, or in boxes of old electronic junk, or other places. So that makes me wonder… Where the hell did all those old memory cards go? You know the will have at least one card with every camera they purchased, and many people will by extras. So why is it that when that equipment gets to the used market, the memory cards needed to use the equipment is no where to be found?

It’s irritating as hell seeing perfectly good equipment on the shelf that you can’t use because you can’t find a memory card small enough to use it.


With the growing size of cards on the shelf, It has gotten to the point that someone really needs to find a way to hack an SDHC card to make it appear as an SD card with a smaller size. Where you could take a 4 GB SDHC card and hack it to where it would conform to the older SD standard and report it’s capacity as 256mb. The same for CF and other media formats.

I know dang well it’s possible. It’s not a hardware issue. The hardware layer interface is the same between SD, and SDHC. It’s strictly a software/firmware issue. I know people hack the firmware on the controllers of 2GB SD cards to report as SDHC 64GB cards and they sell them on ebay to defraud people. And you see people that bought those cards on the different sites using software to rehack the cards to reload the proper firmware into the SD card so that it will be usable again at it’s actual capacity. So the exact opposite should be possible. Take and hack the firmware of a 4 GB SDHC card so that the microcontroller on the SDHC card will report as a FAT formatted SD card with size of 16MB

The problem with me, or someone else out in the consumer market hacking the cards is with the fact that I and other people don’t have access to the source code for the SD card firmware. So we would be starting at an extreme disadvantage. While it would be easy for the manufactures to make a program available to allow you to reprogram your cards to a lower capacity. The manufacturer providing an application for downsizing their product would be the best option.

I don’t care about being able to use the full capacity of the card, I just want to be able to use readily available cards with the equipment I have. I know it’s possible with some hacking, but I have not seen it done at this point in time.

Maybe, when the availability of new old stock low capacity cards reach a certain level, the people or the manufacturers will be forced to come up with a way.

I can only hope that some manufactuer would provide a utility to help people needing a card smaller than they currently provide, by allowing them to intentionally downsize and backslide a larger capacity card that they can readily obtain on the market..