better to eat the cost with memory cards

I read elsewhere someone complaining about the price of memory cards, and thought to myself okay, it can't be that bad...

I was wrong. It is that bad.

Since I have a bunch of old Garmins, I have a pile of 16GB and 32GB microSD memory cards. Just for kicks, I looked up what a 32GB micro SD card costs currently. For name brand, like a SanDisk or Samsung, yeah, it's up there. Grossly overpriced? Sort of.

Where people get screwed the most are for 512GB cards. Those should be selling for $25 less than they do now, but instead rose in price a bit. Again, this is sort of overpriced.

What I find funny is that were I to sell them right now, the pile of used 16GB and 32GB cards I have is worth at least $150+ since they are all highly recognizable name brand. No, I'm not selling, but it's just interesting that in reality, these cards are maybe worth $2 to $5 a pop in lightly used condition, but sell for $12 to even as much as $20+ each at the moment. Yes, even with the low data storage capacity. And for the 512GB cards I have? Easy $75+ each, again for highly recognized name brand in lightly used condition. I'm not selling those either.

I'm not hoarding these cards for selling later since I do actually use them.

Is buying a used memory card safe?

No, because it's a total minefield for how long it will actually work. I'll explain that more in a minute.

I have some vintage Garmins from the mid-2000s that are hardware locked to recognizing SD spec memory cards only, meaning original spec SD 8MB to 2GB capacity. These mid-2000s Garmins originally came with a 128MB card for map data storage.

At one point I said okay, I'm going to upgrade these vintage screens to the maximum storage they could support, 2GB. Off to eBay I go to look for new-old-stock 2GB microSD cards since they had been out of production for years. I searched and searched all over the place, but nope, none available. That being the situation, I had to buy used cards since there was no other option. Found a seller in Canada that had a giant pile of Lexar brand cards. Since that brand made decent stuff back in the day, I bought a couple of 2GB cards for something like $8 shipped. I was irked I even had to spend that much because they basically should be next to free, but whatever, bought them.

Thankfully, those two cards had contacts that weren't crinkled and were able to be both read and written to. I got lucky. And this is where I talk about what a minefield used memory cards are.

Every flash memory card effectively has a charge, and at some point that charge will wear out.

There is one and only one warning sign a memory card is on its last leg, and that's when you can't write data to it. You copy a file over, then try to read the file, and nope, didn't take. You can read other files off the card, but can't write anything new to it.

Right there and then is when you copy all files off that card, confirm the backup is good, then take scissors, cut the card into pieces and toss it in the trash.

And no, there is no reliable way to test flash memory other than by attempting a file write to see if it takes.

I've had this happen twice with USB sticks. One was a really old 512MB (yes, MB) SanDisk cruzer micro. One day I go to write a few small files to it, and while it appeared to copy, it didn't. Copying existing files from the stick worked, but nothing could be written, so it was toast. Trashed it. The other was even worse. It was a 32GB stick where the flashing of OS installation files wrecked it so bad that it wouldn't even recognize when plugged in afterward. Thankfully, there was nothing important on it, and in the trash it went.

With used flash memory, you have absolutely no idea how much it has been used. Was it used a little? A lot? Just for big files or only little files (which does affect longevity)? You don't know and never will.

For that pair of 2GB cards I bought a while back, what I thought was okay, these cards were probably used in a digital camera, and probably only for photos and not video. That's not too many file writes, so... screw it, I'm buying them. It wasn't like I had any other options. Again, I got lucky with the ones I received.

Would I ever buy used flash memory again? No way, because I know the risks. Any used card 8GB or greater was either used in a phone and/or to record video with and is wrecked out of the gate.

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