As it turns out, I did not use my big camera to capture a picture of the hawk that was in my back yard. Not for lack of trying, mind you. Fully charged battery, check. Bird lens, check. I grabbed my memory card out of my card reader and went to slam it into my camera, and. Uh. It wouldn't go in.

Instead I took an exceptionally lousy picture through my landing room window which is not terribly clean at the best of times, and through the screen, with my phone.

I have no idea where the lock switch for that card is. I can tell you exactly where that busted off piece of plastic was: Inside my camera's card slot, trapped by the pins at the bottom of the socket. Hence why I could not get this card or indeed any card to go in far enough to lock, let alone connect. No amount of shaking, tapping, or smacking would dislodge it. I had to retrieve my pair of exceptionally tiny tweezers which naturally were in the garage, which meant going out the back door, which meant scaring off the hawk.

In other news, a direct replacement for this thing now costs three times more than what I originally paid for it, because of course it does.

Gods damned Rampocalypse.

While I wait for my replacement to show up, the largest spare I have on hand that's not already gainfully employed in some other device is apparently a 128 meg one from who knows when. Some time around the turn of the millennium, I'm sure. In case you were wondering, my R10 reckons can fit twenty six full quality exposures onto this card. It's like I'm back to running around with a roll of film.

Needless to say this has rather cramped my style for the last couple of days.

Chewing sd cards is bad, mkay?

I knew silicon prices were already affecting HD and SSD but I didn't draw the parralel to SD cards as well. Somewhere out there some goddamn buffoon is installing SD Cards into a bunch of hubs and expansions for storage on their computers.

That sucks

Hard to believe that we've gone from 128mb to 128gb, I remember when 32gb was a joke "could you imagine" size.

I think it's more likely that silicon foundries are reallocating their production time towards making datacenter hardware because at this particular moment in history that prints money. Or, possibly, prints fairie gold since most of what's been "bought" is contracts on future production of product that hasn't even been manufactured yet, using money that investors are probably going to want back pretty soon now.

We can hope, anyway.

In the meantime I've submitted this for warranty replacement with Sandisk, as it allegedly has a "lifetime" warranty, and I await with interest the variety of cockamamie excuses they'll surely come up with to try to weasel out of giving me a new one.

It's kind of hard to sell the idea that there is some sort of silicon material shortage or that the commercial SD card circuit printing machines are being changed over to produce something else. If the SD cards aren't being consumed directly then the price rises are purely due to wholesaler price manipulation.

On the other hand, a lot of memory circuitry components are interchangable and the only real difference is with the pins.

Damn, that whole situations sucks, minus the hawk sighting. I've never seen an SD card break like that. Any idea what happened? Yeah high-speed SD cards are expensive AF right now. Got lucky a few months ago and scored a 256 GB Extreme Plus card (130 MB/s writes) for $35 at a box store. I had no idea why they were on sale, but it was cheaper than a slower 128 GB card next to it.

I got some 2TB SD cards in at work the other day

You can 'fix' a broken lock switch by just putting a piece of tape over the notch. The switch doesn't actually do anything on the card, SD readers merely check to see if something is in the write position or not. So by covering the notch, the card will always mount as read-write.

I thought all these NAND flash chips came from the same silicon wafers, no?

That's what I'm saying. The supply has changed from consumer electronics towards datacenter electronics. Meaning the total silicon consumed hasn't change much. Or do you mean to say the wafer AFTER printing is the same? Could be, I'm not expert, but I doubt it.

No, I mean that the base materials are now being gobbled up by data centers meaning the supply for consumers is less while the demand is the same, causing prices to increase.

Probably all are true to varying degrees.

There was already an issue with sand smuggling and sand theft before the AI chip buyouts. Sand is the source for the silicon that gets made into wafers. There is a limited amount of input to produce silicon wafers, and increasing scarcity (and the supply purchasing competes on the market with concrete manufacturers and glass makers, among other industries).

Chip fabrication (lithography) machines can cut any pattern into the surface of a wafer (within the limits of their resolution). Changing the pattern to make a different circuit on the wafer is not very complicated. More complicated would be shifting the supply lines for peripheral components to produce SD card circuit boards vs whatever boards the DRAM chips are being assembled on - but as I understand it the major issue is that the AI companies have bought out the chip fabrication for future production runs (for the chips, not actual completed circuit boards) so the supply line part may not be relevant to the price increases. The issue is that all the chip foundries are making DRAM for AI contracts and not much else, so there is a shortage of other types of chips.

And at the same time, there is greed. As prices rise in some areas of the electronics market, suppliers see an opportunity to raise their prices even if their products are not directly impacted by the shortages.

I suspect that a lot of electronics manufacturers have been wanting to increase their prices for awhile, but the market was largely settled on the prices of things and no one could raise their price too high without losing a lot of sales. The disruption has removed the equilibrium, costs are no longer stable, companies are taking risks with high bids and still having no trouble finding buyers, prices are moving all over the place. There's fortunes to be made and blood in the water. Consumer electronics are the lowest priority for every manufacturer at every level of the process.

It's just that the bottleneck is at the number of machines capable of making semiconductors, of etching silicon, not the amount of silicon wafer itself. Silicon is literally melted down rocks and dirt. Plus, most of the equipment capable of reaching 128GB SD level of density are export restricted which further controls the supply.

128 meg one from who knows when

twenty six full quality exposures

That's more than I would have guessed, though we're presumably not talking about raws.

I've got a recently retired uncle who was a doctor, photography is his hobby.

He doesn't reuse his SD cards. Just fills them and buys a new one. I suppose it's an easy way of adding another layer to your backups, but I'll never be able to afford that.

Flash memory will eventually decay if it's not supplied with power on a semi-regular basis. I've heard it's around 10 years, so depending on how long your uncle's been at it he might want to check on his older cards.

You might be able to put the actual board of the SD card into a new case.

I remember salvaging one from an adaptor, although iirc those are a bit flimsy.

Maybe they make new empty ones for that purpose?

That is some serious doctor money flexing lmao

I'd do the same too if I could afford it though lol

Good lord, must be nice to be rich!

Haha

Had an early mp3 player that used some kind of memory card in the 90's, came with a 32mb card. Woot!

it was an act of god

Certainly not. If I saved the raws as well I might be able to fit two.

Not a friggin' clue. That card is obviously dedicated to my camera so 100% of the time is either in my reader or in my camera. It's not like I ever leave it lying around anywhere to have the opportunity to get busted.

For what it's worth I was able to mount it in my card reader still so I did get all the images off of it that were still on it. But even after removing the debris from the slot in my camera that won't read it, so I assume one or more of the contacts aren't touching with the casing busted like that.

Still cheaper than film

Even better, my PC's card reader just has a tiny little limit switch that checks for the presence of the lock switch in the locked position only. It defaults to unlocked. Thus it will work even if the lock switch itself has fallen out of the card (which has happened to me more than once) or can also simply be defeated entirely by clipping its circuit trace or covering its contacts with nail polish or something, provided I could be bothered.

They exist, but double check that they're actually 2tb. The listings I saw had more fakes than real ones.

I've got an eight megabyte CompactFlash card in my box o' antiquated memory cards. I believe it's the one that came with my old HP C200.

What with having said C200, several Canon Powershots of that era including I believe an A40 and later an A70, and several Windows CE based handhelds of various stripes I was quite invested in the CompactFlash ecosystem for a time. I even ran a microdrive in one of my handhelds for a while. I was kind of miffed to see CompactFlash go the way of the dinosaur in favor of MMC/Secure Digital, although it's still used in a few more professional fields.

I've done that before, but I'm not entirely certain the form factor of the board inside the shell is the same across manufacturers and capacities anymore. Maybe you could get away with it but I already had to pick bits of broken card shell out of my camera once this week. This would also require eviscerating one of my increasingly antique vintage cards for a donor shell, and I keep those around because their hilarity value increases progressively with time.

I also briefly toyed with the idea of attempting to 3D print a replacement shell. That'd require some quite fine tolerances, but if I took the time out of my day to stick my 0.2mm nozzle in my printer I'll bet you I could do it.

But since this card purportedly has a warranty I ultimately decided I could not be arsed.

Ope, yeah I had to get a big SD card about a year ago and prices have just been nuts. And 128GB wasn't particularly cheap before all this either

What's the chance you could body swap the chip in that card into a different housing?

Zero now that I've shipped it back to SanDisk for warranty replacement...

Oh, I always forget that warrantied exist, I haven't had great luck with them so far...

I looked it up and apparently bought this card at the nadir of flash memory prices or something. I have $20 in it. (I paid $35 for the new one, which is a slower speed class by one rank. Another one of the exact same card is now $67.) So it's more of the principle of the thing than anything else. I want Sandisk to fork over a new $67 card, because fuck them for pricing it that way. Especially for them temporarily breaking my camera.

Hopefully they honour the warranty. I miss the days when flash storage was cheap, or any new-ish hardware at all...

Yeah, in direct from supplier. 2TB V90; ~$2200 each.
The mind, she boggles!