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Rare Earth Restrictions To Raise Hard Drive Cost
MojoKid writes "Multiple manufacturers in the IT industry have been keeping a wary eye on China's decision to cut back on rare earth exports and the impact it may have on component prices. There have been reports that suggest we'll see that decision hit the hard drive industry this year, with HDD prices trending upwards an estimated 5-10 percent depending on capacity. Although rare earth magnets are only a small part of a hard drive's total cost, China cut exports last year by 40 percent, which drove pricing for these particular components up an estimated 20-30x. China currently controls 97 percent of the rare earth elements market for popular metals like neodymium, cerium, yttrium and ytterbium."
that this article doesn't touch on at all is does this affect Solid State Drives (SSDs)? Probably not because they don't use magnets. So this will just speed up the jump to SSDs. You could be the cynic and think that somehow China decided to raise rare earth prices to drive SSDs, but I kinda doubt that Hard drives in general make up a significant part of that decision.
That's okay. With the economy where it is, we can replace the magnets with interns.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Two background articles on rare earth shortage:
http://www.tikalon.com/blog/blog.php?article=2011/mass_quantities
http://www.tikalon.com/blog/blog.php?article=RE_shortage
The rest of the world (read: US) does not have rare earth mineral (which aren't rare at all, actually) mines because China has a long history of simply lowering prices until all competing mines have gone out of business. China considers that having a monopolistic source for rare earths gives them substantial manufacturing advantages for thousands of products, including florescent lights, medical supplies, and disk drives.
IMHO all of these products, including motors for hybrid vehicles, are too important to allow China to trivial blackmail the rest of the world at their pleasure. All that is needed is the US government to guarantee purchase at some set price and dozens of new mines would open overnight in the US.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
Rotating media is heading the way of the CRT. This will just accelerate the switch to SSD and whatever's next.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
How the fuck do they work?
HDD industry was consolidated. The competition was reduced. There are now basically two producers - WD and Seagate.
As price rise, it will become profitable enough to reopen the mines in the US again.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Oh no! My next 3 TB drive is going to cost $105 instead of $100. The sky is falling!
Pffft. This isn't news worthy.
You too, shall be honored to experience Alex Chiu's [burning sarcasm]miraculous discovery.[/burning sarcasm]
(sorry, but you asked. yes, I am kidding.)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
There is another angle to this. Perhaps China will restrict the export of components, such as rare earth magnets, to be used in the manufacture/assembly of HDs in other countries but they will probably not restrict the export of Chinese manufactured/assembled HDs. This may merely be a tactic to force Seagate and WD to move more production to China.
China does not want to manufacture low priced commodities. They want to manufacture high tech finished goods. They will use all forms of pressure to reach this goal.
Right now Hybrid vehicles either use brushless DC or permeant magnet excited AC motors. Both need rare earth magnets and neither are as powerful or efficient for their application as switched reluctance motors which do not use magnets at all. If the electric auto industry was innovative, they would all be using switched reluctance motors and China could eat their rare earth magnets.
My guess is a swamp of patents by Toyota that keep them in the dark ages so they can protect their IP.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
The world is headed towards SSDs anyway. In fact this is only going to spur incentives for more rapid development of larger drives.
Aren't most HDDs made in China? So how does cutting export of rare earth metals make a difference?
With all the old hard drives that wear out or become obsolete, I wonder if there is any effort being put into recycling the rare earth magnets they contain, or if old drives are just dumped by the ton into landfills.
All that is needed is the US government to guarantee purchase at some set price and dozens of new mines would open overnight in the US.
New mines do not open "overnight". It takes years of development to open a new mine.
If there are old mines that have simply been mothballed, those could probably be restored to production pretty fast.
Sorry. You must have missed the news about the discovery of the Elk Creek lousewort. Genetically identical to every other lousewort, but the courts say the Elk Creek variety is a distinct species. So no digging anywhere near it. Endangered, of course.
Have gnu, will travel.
China is pretty much copying the Wal-Mart model, absorb losses until your competitors go out of business, then jack up the price.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Japanese aren't investing like crazy in mines in the US(and other places). Not only are a lot of their industries dependent upon them, but with the yen being insanely strong right now they would be insane not to take advantage of that and get mining rights on the cheap.
Monstar L
The Chinese will mess with the price of Rare Earths (which are not really all that rare) and the US will almost certainly begin using its own from a major find in California. All the while Austrailia, Japan, Africa and South America look at seriously developing their resources. The real lock China has on Rare Earths is its processing (pretty much the only game in town right now.) Here's a chance for the U.S. to get back into industrial jobs (god forbid) and produce a lasting job base for a new global economic boom in the rare earth arena. The Chinese advantage is short term, and if they squeeze too hard, the world will simply take their business away. Nobody likes a chiseler.
By the way rare earths are used all over the place and for a dizzying array of things. There are about 400 lbs of them in a late model Prius. They are used in virtually all green tech (high performance generators in modern wind mills are pretty much sluggs of rare earths.) Colorful plasma and LED displays use them (that cool display on your smart phone is probably chock full of rare earths.) Florescent lighting that is any color but off green uses rare earth mixed in with the coating. Rare earths are used in glass making, advanced textiles, plastics with special properties (OLEDs), and anything that uses an enhanced magnetic field from an earbud to an mag-lev train. Even the "Euro" contains a trace of Europium as an elemental pun. Modern society runs on rare earths.
This will also affect the Live Music Manufacturers since all the really sexy new light speakers are driven with Neodymium magnets and they use a lot more of the stuff per unit (lbs vs grams) than HDs
http://www.talkbass.com/forum/f87/neodymium-%93light-weight%94-speaker-cabinet-review-167954/
Neodymium magnets plus Class D amplifiers are creating a sea change in live amplification -I have a Markbass combo amp that does 300watts into a 12-inch speaker and weighs less than 40 lbs -of course it cost a bit: ~$1k
http://www.markbass.it/products.php
1500 watts, 18" subwoofer -only 43 kg
http://www.master-audio.com/producto.asp?id=195
genz-benz is another maker of really light powerful gear as well
http://www.genzbenz.com/?fa=whatsnew
I'm just sayin'
there's mines in the US that have been closed, yes. "fast" is relative; the one major mine i recall hearing about was exploring reopening, and "few years" pops to mind as the timeline for getting it back to production
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Our rare earth mines are just getting started. But the deposits are huge. It may be a couple years before it relaxes the market, but by no means do they control the rare earth market. They want you to think that to inflate demand. There are lots of other sources all over Canada being surveyed (and all over the united states for that matter http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/08/04/1857220/Rare-Earth-Deposit-Discovered-In-US)
It's too easy to say that China is simply undercutting prices. In fact, both Europe and the USA could simply refuse to import rare earth minerals that are not mined according to appropriate environmental standards. But they don't - because they fear that their cronies will blame them for a their latest 1% fall in revenue, should they do and the radical environmentalists will stage another outbreak of moral panic anyway.
The result of environmental standards in the USA and Europe is for the most part simply that those things are done cheaper and dirtier elsewhere (China, India, Africa, whatever). In short, it's NIMBY whatever color the veil.
We did just fine so far... ENTERPRISE drives are still 3-4x as expensive. Doesn't hurt anything except useless posts on Internet boards... They MIGHT have to send THIS post to the bitbucket in the sky ... Someday like 5 years from now...
To free up space for LOLCats!
Seriously, the machine I admin with all my company's data is only 500GB of meaningful data. that's up from about 450 or so a few years ago. The business factor is not very high for manufacturing related things..
Seriously. Anyone have statistics on the number of hard drives produced over the years?
I don't want any kind of 'reluctance' motor in my car, switched or otherwise.
When I step on the pedal, I want the damn thing to go, not to complain about the traffic or the pollution or how much weight I've stuffed in the car.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This is total bullshit. The reason they are increasing HD costs is because of SSD's. They are trying to leverage the cost ratio and exploit that ratio. If that is too complex someone explain it because I'm busy.
Well, if you think the cover story here is bullshit, then let's break this down to the real reason China has decreased exports and effected an increase in costs of (not-so)rare earth materials.
Because they can.
Oh wait, here's one more reason...
Because we let them.
'nuff said.
The EV industry is far from innovative. Their drive trains are ridiculously inefficient. All they've done is taken out a gas engine and replaced it with a battery. They should be able to achieve twice the mileage from the same battery life as they get now. I don't understand why no one is willing to innovate.
I have one metric shitload of neodymium from hard drive magnets. Where can I turn this fun to play with and fun to say metal into money?
The game.
It's totally possible to build electric motors that use electromagnets for both the rotor and the stator... Could someone explain why permanent magnets are so much better?
Switched Reluctance motors are the future in many industries with automotive being one of the most important and aviation being another. They have the most torque to weight of any motor (including rare earth magnet brushless DC) and more importantly have both enormous starting torque and high speed. This means no transmission is necessary as is now with both AC and DC designs. The element that has been holding them back is processing speed of the drive cpu's and the electronics themselves. Right now there are "notchy" at startup. With faster hardware and more sophisticated software this issue can be overcome. I have seen some experimental "drives" using a TI chip that has both an ARM based CPU and a DSP on the same chip. When the software catches up, many industries that now use current motor designs will be able to use the switched reluctance type motor to tremendous advantage. It's the future. And they don't use magnets.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
wow that's the first outright troll post i've seen from kdawson. I guess he figured not enough of his jizm was on the site.
boring really: accelerating electron makes a photon, photon is absorbed by another electron which causes it to accelerate.
Not for nothing, but Japan may be somewhat leery of processing REs in light of their recent brush with nuclear materials. At the very least, it could be politically risky.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Isn't that what fuel efficiency regulation is meant to encourage?
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
"Each Prius, which is powered by a combination internal combustion engine and electric motor, uses about one kg (2.2 lb) of neodymium in the motor and 10 to 15 kg (22-33 lb) of lanthanum in the battery."
I come here for the love
SSD's dramatically increase the speed of a computer during regular usage. The fastest spinner is a fraction of the speed of a low-end modern SSD. My mediocre Kingston puts all spinners to shame.
Moron.
Are you saying that the automotive industry is... reluctant to switch to those motors?
*puts on sunglasses*
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
Examine the name closely, I got a laugh out of it too.
Fuel efficiency has no effect on EV's since they don't use fuel...
Article I read explained that specific RPM ranges the particular motor is tuned for, a rare earth motor can have a higher torque because you get a certain amount of field strength 'for free' with the field generated by the rare earth. To get that same field strength with switched reluctance, you need to add more weight in the form of thicker wires so you can use more current.
IIRC the US has a lot of rare earths, they are simply not exploited because of environmental concerns.
Also, I wonder how much rare earths are in old electronics and landfills.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Could not agree more. Ultimately, China's heedlessness is helping manufacture future catastrophe for every living thing on the planet. As is all negligence of environmental concerns.
you had me at #!
The processing and control requirements look no greater than that needed for vector controlled AC drives and those have been around for at least 20 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_torque_control
With some type of position encoding, I am certain even a 20 MIPS PIC microcontroller could handle it with appropriate hardware. If they are having performance problems with ARM, then they are using the wrong programming language.
Modified SIN wave stepper drivers that compensate for the nonlinear inductance to prevent cogging have been around for a long time as well but they are only used in the highest performance applications. Switched reluctance motors are just a more extreme case.
Or more weight in the form of more wire requiring a higher voltage. Rare earth PM motors may have a power to weight and volume advantage but they are not going to be significantly more efficient.
LOL, good catch
Just what I read, I'm not an electrical engineer. But it isn't at all surprising that there's tradeoffs, which is why we use rare earth motors so often right now. Switched reluctance does sound like the ultimate way to do electric motors, however. Even better if the wire in one is made with superconductors.
I posted on this earlier from my phone, but it looks like it never showed up. We DO have old mines here in the US and at least one of them has re-opened. If you live in Southern California or Las Vegas, you can go see it. It's in the Mojave Desert just off of I-15, near the exit to Nipton, California. Look to the north as you're crossing that little mountain. China has been (probably illegally) dumping Rare Earth metals on us at below their cost for some time. The purpose was to drive our domestic producers out of business. But the ore is still there in the ground, the mining claims are still valid, and in some cases it isn't that difficult to re-open the mines. Yes, the prices of hard drives will go up. A little. Because the prices of Rare Earths has been artificially low. But there's no Armageddon looming here, just a correction that will probably be relatively small.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
No big deal, just get your drives at Harbor Freight.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Ok, yes yes very clever. I'm talking about hybrids obviously. I'm no engineer, but I'd hazard that increasing fuel efficiency of hybrids would require innovation in the electric... bits.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Maybe, but not in terms of improving the drivetrain, which is pathetically old and inefficient in current EVs (right now all they do is take out a gasoline engine and replace it with a giant battery), or encouraging higher capacity batteries.