Category: News

Memory Card Prices are Dumb

April Store Closure and Pricing Notice

The Eternal Retro store will be forced to pause order fulfillment for about 2 weeks mid-April. Exact dates have yet to be determined, but just a head’s up. There will be no sorry-for-the-wait shop discount for this one, unfortunately; with as rapidly as media prices keep increasing and how supply is usually limited when we do find a good price it’s hard to predict what’s going on in the future.

Shop prices keep creeping up a bit at a time. When we find a deal on media we pass it on, but once we’ve run out of that discount stock things get adjusted to the new media prices.

The discounted 16GB cards for the small collections we’re down to the last box, so once those are used up those will likely end up getting switched to 32GB cards and 32GB pricing. We’ve secured a substantial number of 32GB cards, though so those should be good for a while. 256GB+ is going to be the most volatile, though we’ve got a pretty good stock of 512GB coming.

1TB, yeah… 🔥

I fully appreciate the irony of using that which has destroyed us to make ha ha funny internet picture...

Media Shortages & Price Changes

… it’s grim out there.
Whether the NAND shortages are the cause or if it’s just another run on toilet paper with people buying and hording media fearing a real shortage, the pain is real. Prices on media; microSDs and SSDs, and even many capacities of HDD, have been changing rapidly. We’ve seen some capacities increase in cost 40% in just a few days, and other stock that is available is sometimes taking weeks to actually be delivered. Other times even when we can find something in stock, suppliers are limiting purchases to 2-3 units.

Our own stockpiles of memory continue to dwindle, and restocks are growing fewer and more expensive. We’re still trying to find deals where we can to pass those savings on, but even some capacities we thought we had a reliable supply and just lowered prices on (like 1TB) went right back up 30%+ a few days later. 512GB MicroSDs have increased upwards of 100%, while other media (like 1TB SATA m.2s) are getting hard to even find at all at any price.

We’re at the point where we’ve started considering abandoning our “only major brand” media rule for a while as brands like Silicon Power keep looking more and more enticing. (If you’re a brand loyalist and want specific media no matter the cost, just let us know and we can see what we can do.)

Delivery time will definitely be impacted, unfortunately. Prices will likely end up being adjusted with every restock to account for price flux and availability. We reserve the right to cancel and refund orders should they become unable to be fulfilled. Strap in, it may be a while…

Customer Supplied Media
Have your own stock of MicroSDs or HDDs you want to mail it in to be imaged instead of buying new? This is an option we’re open to; of course at a significant discount since the media isn’t being priced in. Just contact us if you want to discuss such a transaction.

Payment Processor Changes

We’ve recently switched to a different payment processor plugin for the site, trying to find an all-in-one solution that works more reliably on both desktop and mobile browsers. If you have any issues checking out, please let us know!

Memory Card Price Increases & Shortages

As many may have already heard, the tech companies building massive acres-large datacenters are taking more than just entire state’s worth of water and electricity; they’re also vacuuming up all the NAND production for storage. This has led to a shortage of everything, and price increases on MicroSDs, SSDs, and even some HDDs.

So far we’ve been able to avoid the price increase by switching to brands that haven’t yet been as impacted; namely SanDisk cards have been replaced with PNY and some Transcend. While we have a standing policy not to use unbranded, store branded, or random bang-on-the-keyboard-to-find-an-unused-trademark-named Chinese media, we feel these two are acceptable as being from “real legit companies.”

Actual supply shortages have still been a bit of a struggle unfortunately, especially with some vendors limiting how many pieces you can buy at a time. We’ve been barely keeping ahead of what we need for orders, and in some cases having to delay orders for 2-3 days that would normally ship next day, just due to being unable to get the media in. So far we’re keeping up, but there may be inventory delays in the future.

We’ll be trying to go through the site in the upcoming weeks to remove any images showing specific brand names, or specific brand names in the descriptive text; SanDisk isn’t likely to be used for a while, or pricing will have to increase on many items. (Though some are still going down when we look at adjusting prices again; especially the hard drives and anything on 512GB media.)

GameCube Collection tested on FlippyDrive

We’ve finally received our FlippyDrive! A fantastic product, especially for those who don’t want to remove the optical drive for a GCLoader install, or wanting a stealth mod; since it’s not visible at all as a modded console once the shell is put back together.

We’ve confirmed the 1TB collection just works in the Flippy, so we’ve added it’s description to the GameCube SD Card.

Unfortunately, even with a FAT32 formatted card, the other emulators don’t support it as a valid SD path, so the GameCube Emulator Add-on Collection still requires a SD2SP adapter for use.