Are you sitting on a gold mine?

A customer put a box on our bench recently. Used industrial cards, pulled from machines during routine service, kept because throwing them away felt wrong. We counted them, checked the part numbers against current list prices, and did the sum. To buy that box new today would cost in the region of £30,000, if the parts could be found at all. Most of them had the majority of their rated life left.

That box is not unusual. It is what most organisations with a fleet of equipment have, somewhere: a drawer, a cupboard, a crate in the stores. The difference now is what it is worth.

What has happened to memory prices

For twenty years the safe assumption was that flash storage only got cheaper. That stopped in 2025. Memory makers have moved production towards the parts that AI data centres buy, and the cards, USB drives and embedded storage the rest of us depend on get what is left.

The numbers are stark. TrendForce, the industry’s main price tracker, reported NAND flash contract prices rising by as much as 75 per cent in a single quarter in early 2026, and forecasts a further 10 to 15 per cent rise in the third quarter, with suppliers “continuing to prioritise capacity allocation toward higher-margin AI and server products” (TrendForce, 3 July 2026). Analysts at Storage Switzerland put it more bluntly: new fab capacity “will not arrive in volume before late 2027, with meaningful relief pushed into 2028 or 2029” (Storage Switzerland, 6 May 2026). The makers themselves are less optimistic than the analysts. Micron’s chief executive expects the shortage to run through 2027 with supply improving in 2028; Samsung expects it to continue through 2028; SK Hynix and the chairman of SK Group both expect it to persist until 2030, and a 2026 study by Kearney’s PERLab puts the end at 2030 at the earliest (summary and sources on Wikipedia). Whichever of those is right, this is not a blip that a purchasing department can wait out.

For industrial and endurance cards, the parts that go into cameras, machines and vehicles, the effect is worse than the headline. These are small volumes for the makers. When wafers are scarce they are the first lines to be allocated down, so the price rises and the lead time stretches at the same time. If you have tried to buy a specific industrial SD card this year you already know this.

What a used card is actually worth

A flash card wears out gradually and predictably. Its controller keeps count: how many erase cycles each block has seen, how many spare blocks remain, how many times the power was cut mid-write. On the cards we can read, that data tells you exactly how much life is left. A card at ten per cent of its rated cycles is not a used card in any meaningful sense. It is a new card with a history.

This is the calculation that has changed. When a replacement cost £8 and arrived tomorrow, reading the old one was not worth the bother. When the replacement costs £25, ships in twelve weeks, and might be a counterfeit when it arrives, the old card with 90 per cent of its life left is the better part.

Three things stop people using them:

• Nobody knows which ones are healthy. Without reading the controller, a worn card and a fresh one look identical.
• They may hold data. A card out of a camera or a machine may carry personal data or configuration. It cannot go back into service, or be sold, until that is provably gone.
• There is no paperwork. An auditor, or a customer, wants to see why a reused part is acceptable.

Turning the box into stock

This is what our media line does. Each card gets its identity checked, its capacity verified, its health read where the maker’s interface allows it, and a certified erasure to NIST 800-88. It comes back graded, with a certificate for the wipe and a passport for the card that records what was measured. The good ones go back into your machines. The worn ones are retired with evidence. The counterfeits, and there are usually some, are pulled out before they fail in service.

The economics are simple. Recertifying an 8 GB industrial card costs a fraction of buying one, and it is available now rather than in a quarter’s time. Across a box of a few hundred cards the difference is the £30,000 we started with.

If you do not want the cards back, we buy them. Certified pre-owned industrial media is a market now, for the reasons above, and a box of used cards with provable health is worth real money to organisations that cannot get new ones.

Where to start

Count the cards you have. If it is more than a handful, ask for an estimate or send us the details and we will tell you what the box is worth to reuse, and what it is worth to sell. Our supported media page lists the brands we can read health data on, and how far we trust each reading, so you can see before you ship anything whether your cards are ones we can fully assess.

The box in the stores is not scrap. This year, it might be the cheapest and fastest storage you can get.