Supply issues continue.
We’ve managed to secure a stockpile of all capacity cards 32GB-512GB we need for a while, and at a price we’re happy with.
1TB media is obtainable, but only at prices for the truly desperate. Media that used to be $67 pre-war is now closer to $200. Our usual wholesale supplier, despite raising the price of SanDisk 1TB cards up to $170, can’t even keep them in stock. Those brands (like Silicon Power) we have been able to find under $130 are typically limited to 1 or 2 cards per order per month.
Grabbing media from third-parties has been risky and frustrating. Sites like eBay are plagued with an absolutely unprecedented number of fakes, frauds, and counterfeits. (Of which eBay does nothing to stop, I might add. Hundreds of listings from >10 rated new profiles selling SanDisk and Samsung media for under $50… hey, yeah… they’re not real. Which a counterfeit would be fine at this point, if they worked… but unlike a knockoff Juicy handbag, they won’t still hold your stuff; all the Chinese counterfeit cards claim a 1TB capacity but are lucky to hold 16GB if anything at all. Most just don’t even mount as a drive.)
Hard Drives are also growing very difficult to source. We have just a tiny number of 4TB drives for the Wii collection and 6TB drives for the PS2 collection on hand, and the prices to replace those have almost doubled as well.
Collections currently on 1TB cards, as well as hard drives, will very likely see a dramatic increase in price as we will be forced to buy new blank media at nearly the same cost we’re selling the finished collections now. Can’t be helped.
