Comment by akelly

This is a whole industry in China. There are buildings in Shenzhen with hundreds of vendors selling scavenged storage and memory chips, because those are highly standardized. And discontinued chips from the 80s and 90s are salvaged and sold on ebay and AliExpress so people can repair their old electronics. I've even seen broken laptops get their CPUs desoldered and turned into desktops with custom adapter boards. They're incredibly creative when there's profit to be made.