Bear in mind that a machine that old may well not recognise a drive bigger than 528MB (or at least, it may not "see" any space beyond that unless you use third-party software like EZ-Drive) because of limitations in how the BIOS addresses devices. If the BIOS offers "LBA mode", you should be OK, possibly up to as much as 8GB (the next "barrier"). Also, versions of MS-DOS prior to v7 (which was the DOS component of Win95) didn't support FAT32 so, if you wanted optimum space-allocation efficiency, you had to stick to partition sizes less than 256MB (to get 4kB clusters on FAT16).
If you can't get hold of a suitable "spinning rust" drive (it'll be loud!) you might be able to find a 512MB CF card and use an adaptor - or even find a small "IDE flash drive" (i.e. an SSD in today's parlance) which were quite common in embedded applications some years back and came in relatively small capacities.
I think I've got a few sub-1GB IDE drives sitting around somewhere as spares for my Acorn Archimedes computers but whether any of them still work is another matter. They're all pretty noisy by today's standards - the whirr and clatter of the hard drive (along with the "grunting" of the floppy drive) was a normal part of the computing experience in those days. WD Caviar units were generally regarded as the best drives and, to my mind, had a rather nice (and very distinctive) sound too. I could never afford one in those days, unfortunately...
You mentioned in the other thread that the PC had a VLB SCSI controller - maybe an old SCSI drive might be a better idea as SCSI BIOSes were usually more flexible when it came to drive sizes. Beware that SCSI drives tended to be even louder, though - they were generally designed as "high performance" drives. (I've got a couple of 1GB 12-platter units which sound like airliners starting up when you turn them on - and generate almost as much heat!)
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