Rare Earth Restrictions To Raise Hard Drive Cost 254
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."
The obvious first question... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Small fast SSDs complement, but don't replace large slow HDDs.
Re:The obvious first question... (Score:4, Interesting)
5-10% isn't that much. Spinning discs will still be a lot cheaper than even the cheapest SSDs.
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5-10% isn't that much. Spinning discs will still be a lot cheaper than even the cheapest SSDs.
Yeah, and 4 megabytes of RAM used to cost over $100.
Point is SSDs are still the "blu-ray" of hard drives out there, commanding their own fancy premium. Once they're pretty much commonplace, they'll be on par with traditional spinning platters (especially considering this article pointing out an increase in costs for traditional designs)
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I remember 8MB of RAM costing $300 back in 1996 or so and an article came out in PC Magazine or something called "Why RAM prices won't go down", then a month or two later, they dropped through the floor.
Re:The obvious first question... (Score:5, Informative)
And about time, too. Prior to that RAM had been expensive forever. 4MB of RAM had been $200 for at least three years before the prices started going down.
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Maybe you did. That doesn't mean that you didn't get ripped off. I had a server with 160MB of RAM in June of 1999, that would have cost $16,000 at those prices, which it didn't:
and I even have proof, read the entry for June 9th [archive.org]
I know I didn't pay $16,000 for the ram, or even $1600. Maybe $1000. I simply couldn't have afforded that back then. So ram must have been down to $10/MB or less by 1999.
Re:The obvious first question... (Score:4, Insightful)
Point is that we don't know /when/ SSDs are going to reach that magical point, but it'll certainly be after we see the effects of China tightening up the rare-earth supply.
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I expect they're also waiting for UEFI to achieve more market penetration, since plain old BIOSes are limited to 2TB drives on account of the old Master Boot Record's limitations. The 3TB drives are the first iteration to need UEFI and as such are useful for probing what the market will do.
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I still do not get why current BIOSes cannot be made compatible with larger drives.
Now, granted, the MBR has the 2TB limit, but BIOS does not require that MBR. What I mean is, bios just loads the first (zeroth?) sector of the hard drive to memory and jumps to that location in memory. It does not care what is in it. From then the CPU executes whatever instructions were in that first sector.
Also, while boot code and the partition table are currently on the same sector, there is no particular need why they hav
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Also it might make research in recycling old hard drives more of an option. The rare earth are probably mostly in the magnetic heads. I dunno about the platters.
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This is as marvelous as their other bone headed move with Taiwan. It will spur the development of MRAM and other technologies for SSDs. It will spur manufacturing to move to one of several hundred countries that are not psychically traumatized by a small island that sneered at them and went independent.
Even Britain didn't go that loony over America they went loony over .. I'm not sure what.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The obvious first question... (Score:5, Insightful)
actually, you're 100% wrong.
The restrictions are to try to get high tech industry to develop in China. There are no restrictions of use of rare earth metals in China, just the export of the raw materials. It's a good way to ensure high tech manufacturing does develop. Essentially China can hold the world to ransom due their highly developed and underpaid RE mining industry. It's much cheaper to refine RE minerals in China due to lack of industrial relations and environmental laws.
Hell, even Australian RE companies are hesitant to set up refining here due to the massive amounts of radioactive waste from refining RE minerals.
China are even buying up large stakes in Australian RE mining companies just to gain even more of an edge. Chinalco attempted to take over Australia's largest RE miner and was blocked by the ACCC in no small part due to China's stance on RE exports.
Maybe look a bit deeper rather than just looking at company profits. China are all about bringing jobs onshore and having the upper hand globally.
Aside from this, very happy I bought 4x 2GB HDDs recently for my new array, in before the price rise!
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Spot on. Hard drive makers have always been keen on keeping the drive suspension (the really precise and expensive part of the head) manufactured in the West. You send that over to China and you can kiss your company goodbye long term. Both US and Australia have plenty of materials to go back into the rare earth business. There may be something to having a strategic stockpile to keep the market stable.
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Remember, this is not a "command economy" but a "free market", and in these "free market" economies, corporations are encouraged (if not legally required) to do anything they can to maximise profits for their shareholders, not to pay an empty piss-bucket worth of attention to petty-mi
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Have you ever actually used an SSD? The speed is quite noticeable, coming from a fresh install of arch on a 7200RPM to a SATAII SSD. The reason they cost so much is because flash is a bit harder to scale up than magnetic drives, which can come for pennies on the gigabyte. They also are far less prone to failure than mechanical drives, containing no moving parts. So SSDs are perfect for both embedded systems and smaller systems, and they should be complimented by a TB drive when more space is needed. The onl
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And yet, not all applications need drives that fast. For example, my movie collection does not need 100MB/s read speed. I do not need a 64GB SSD for the movie collection. If my collection is small enough to fit in 64GB then I could buy a used 80GB hard drive and save lots of money.
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What's worse is that a $5 jump in the price of a hard drive will mean computers will go up by about $200, and manufacturers (the few that are left) will say that they have to raise prices because "of the rise in component cost".
By my calculations, by the year 2015 there will be two corporations in every sector. Two oil companies, two beverage companies, two computer manufacturers, two banks. And two by two they will board the ark and leave the rest of the fucking human race in
You are a moron, Coward. (Score:2)
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.
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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.
A solution. (Score:5, Funny)
That's okay. With the economy where it is, we can replace the magnets with interns.
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I don't know where you got your info from, but we and (IIRC all) others in my industry pay our interns. Way better than H1Bs.
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Many industries do, but at least some industries don't. There are some legal issues around not paying, though.
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And interns work for free.
Intern does not mean "work for free". I, and many others, were paid quite well as interns at an automotive factory years ago while in college.
Yet another obvious solution (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Yet another obvious solution (Score:5, Informative)
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.
No, the market price by itself would support opening or reopening [arstechnica.com] of rare earth mines. What you may need is a waiver from the EPA.
Rare earth mining is problematic because even 'high quality' ore is very dilute. Vast quantities of material have to be processed in order to obtain any product. The primary extractive processes aren't all that polluting. The mines use a combination of physical process (magnetic separation, water separation) to concentrate the material to about 50% purity. Getting it from 50% to pure metal, however, requires quite a bit of energy and the use of a number of toxic processes.
One way to solve this problem is to do the primary extraction at the mine site and then transport the more valuable (and now quite a bit more concentrated) ore to a central site which has the technology and supervision to further extract the material at minimal environmental risk. The US DOE (Dept. of Energy) is looking into these sorts of issues. Of course, China need not be bothered by any of this mamby pamby Greeny stuff, so they have a built in competitive advantage.
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While we can discuss where the line is, not wanting to poison the drinking water is not mamby pamby.
Maybe you should look into the condition of drinking water down stream prior to 1970.
Re:Yet another obvious solution (Score:5, Insightful)
!! sarcasm alert !!
Read it again. I don't think China is doing anyone a favor by trashing their environment for short term profit. The balance between environmental regulation and economic opportunity is a difficult one to maintain, but I for one, am happy to pay a bit more for clean water and happy critters.
My point is that with some forethought and planning, it appears possible to increase the US rare earth mining with acceptable environmental damage by centralizing the secondary refinement process so it can be closely controlled and monitored and perhaps reap some benefits of scale. There was an interesting report on this somewhere, can't recall where I found it and Google and my brain aren't working together as a team this afternoon....
In general, China's current approach to trashing the environment on a huge scale is going to come back and bite them in the ass within a generation. Inscrutable long term planning, indeed.
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Found it. Interesting read. [raremetalblog.com]
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No, the market price by itself would support opening or reopening [arstechnica.com] of rare earth mines.
NOT, actually. Nobody will invest in a mine at ANY market price because history shows that China is likely to AGAIN drop prices in the future, driving other mines out of business. THUS, some kind of guarantee for investors is needed.
Re:Yet another obvious solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the exact reverse of what you are claiming will happen.
Everyone else in the world will have tapped out all of their resources and we will be left with ours. We will be left with our Oil and our Rare Earths because the EPA stuck it's nose in. When it matters, WE will be the ones that are self sufficient.
That's what happens when you plan ahead or consider something more than just the moment.
Sure, it's side effect the tree hugger's view of thinking ahead but it works out anyways.
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We will be left with our Oil and our Rare Earths because the EPA stuck it's nose in. When it matters, WE will be the ones that are self sufficient.
And then you will run out too. Then what?
Re:Yet another obvious solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless something happens like happened to aluminum. At one point it was one of, if not the, most difficult metals to refine, and was worth more than gold or in some cases platinum. Then over the span of about a year, a couple people developed a new method of refining it [wikipedia.org]. The price crashed to where, while still more expensive than other metals, is so cheap that we throw away cans and foil made out of it.
If there's a fusion breakthrough, oil prices will crash within a year or two. Rare earths are actually not that rare, they just take a lot of work to refine. If some new, cheaper method of refining them is invented, any vast reserves of them that we are hoarding could become worthless overnight.
Pass environmental laws because you want to protect the environment. Not because you want to gamble that a material will become rarer and more desirable in the future, under the guise of "planning ahead". If you really think the gamble is worth it, then be forthcoming and advocate planning ahead and conserving those supplies for exactly that reason (e.g. helium). Don't try to spin it as justification for environmental laws or vice versa.
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That's a much better idea. Let's "drill baby drill!" and pillage the only planet we know of where humans can survive so we can make money and have our fancy gizmos. Fuck later generations and their interest in having a healthy ecosystem in which to live.
If we wanted to truly be better, we'd invest money in new technologies that let us utilize resources w/o having to destroy everything to get at them. It would be difficult, sure, but we sent people to fucking moon just to rub it in the Soviets faces. I would
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Fuck later generations
Yes, fuck them. Because if we don't fuck it up, they will. At least we can enjoy ourselves while fucking things up. All this healthy ecosystem garbage is just a political talking point. People keep breeding like rats and soon it won't matter how careful you are or how much you recycle, there won't be enough raw materials per capita, and there will be too much filth per m2. So fuck everyone. If people were responsible they would limit themselves to 2 children or less. I have. But most people aren't responsib
Environmentalist hypocrisy (Score:2)
The result of environmental standards in the USA and Europe is for the most part simpl
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The companies buying the raw materials are at fault, really.
They knowingly buy their raw materials from mining companies that they know will jack up prices as soon as their slightly more expensive competitors are out of business. The companies are idiots, because they're looking at quarterly financial statements rather than long term.
Sure, you may be able to buy the raw materials slightly cheaper now, but in two years you've helped drive the mining companies' competitors out of business, and you can bet you
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Here's the problem. If you don't buy the cheaper materials, your company might not even be around in 2 years. That's the problem.
The solution should be a moratorium on chinese REs, or at least a tariff, neither of which will ever happen, and neither of which would work anyway because places like.. well, China.. wouldn't participate, so those that did would just be committing economic suicide.
Ugly situation every way you look at it.
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Correction:
The problem is that if you don't buy the cheaper materials, the numbers in the next quarterly report won't be quite so high as they might have been, and the CEO's quarterly bonus might be a tad lower. And most C-level execs are completely incapable of looking past the next quarter and their next bonus check.
For the overall health of the company, long-term planning and purchasing does work. As the parent said, just look at Apple; and see what happens when you pay your CEO with long-term stock op
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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.
It is non trivial to bring these online. It takes on the order of years but this ball is already rolling.
The chinese might be able to screw the market over in the short run.. over the long haul they are only screwing themselves.
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Yes, China acts strategically in China's best interest. If the USA and other nations do not act in their own best interest, then China will become far dominant. That is not a bad thing. May the bet nation win. I think China will be that nation. If your own system cannot compete, then don't bitch: change it so that it CAN compete.
Incomplete. Nations may evolve in a sense, but they also benefit from world stability and the improvement of their community. The short-term selfish act may not generate the best result in the long term.
Look up Nash Equilibrium.
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The Chinese people are firewood.
All people are "firewood" to their governments. No exceptions.
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Sometimes it's worth paying a higher price for strategic reasons. If the supply of something important is subject to disruption because of political considerations then it may be worth assuring that supply even if it costs more because the cost of not having it is much greater.
dead man walking (Score:3)
Rotating media is heading the way of the CRT. This will just accelerate the switch to SSD and whatever's next.
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I had a G2 Postville in my laptop for a while, and just swapped it back out for a Spinpoint M8. With 8GB of RAM and Superfetch, the difference is definitely noticeable, but IMHO not worth the hit in storage capacity and price. Being able to have more than a barebones operating system with me (I can't really fit much more than Win7 x64 and my applications on an 80gig SSD) is currently worth more to me than the speed boost of an SSD, and 300+GB SSDs (what I'd realistically need to not have to plug in an exter
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SSDs are at or around a dollar per gigabyte. That's only running about six years behind the price of hard drives. In those six years, hard drive prices have dropped by a factor of ten. In the past three years, solid state disks have dropped by more than a factor of twenty. Thus, SSDs are dropping in price more than four times as fast as hard drives. If we extrapolate that into the future, the current order of magnitude will go away in about seven or eight years without this added burden on hard drives.
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As far as I can tell from a number of searches on the subject, SSDs were mostly in the ballpark of $10 per gigabyte for most of 2008, +/- about $2.50 per gigabyte, with the cheapest drives falling to somewhere around $2.30 per gigabyte by year's end. They've never been anywhere close to $1 per gigabyte in terms of what the customer actually pays.
Maybe you're confusing true SSDs with USB flash drives? Or maybe you're confusing bare flash part prices with the price of the finished product?
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The SSD's that were $1/GB in 2008 were total crap though. Often slower than regular hard drives, even for random access.
Intel's X25-M arrived late 2008 at around $600 pr 80GB.
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And if we extrapolate further, within 10 years manufacturers will be PAYING YOU to take SSDs off their hands.
No, your conclusions aren't any less flawed.
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No matter how many factors of twenty you reduce the price, it will never get negative.
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Only if you extrapolate in a really stupid way by assuming that prices will drop by $X per gigabyte instead of assuming that prices will continue to drop by a certain percentage per year as I did.
Yes, my conclusions are a hell of a lot less flawed. They're certainly no guarantee of future performance, as new technology tends to be bursty and rather unpredictable, but they're at least a decent ballpark guess, which is more than you have offered.
Either way, it's pretty clear that SSD technology has more room
5% increase on hard drives... (Score:4, Funny)
Pffft. This isn't news worthy.
Re:5% increase on hard drives...more for speakers2 (Score:2)
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
h
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Companies that buy drives in bulk to put into storage servers don't care about this 5% when compared to the retail price of drives.
They are already paying an arm and a leg to have a certain company's brand name on it along with support and warranty assurances.
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H*ll... once someone put the price hike into it's proper context I realized that even I personally would not change my buying habits over this. I am not going to go out and by 5 or 10 more drives today just because the price is going to go up something on the order of my local sales tax.
So what...... (Score:2)
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So either China gets big money from increased prices on rare earth exports, or they get big money manufacturing more expensive SSDs... win/win for China?
Most HDDs are Made in China (Score:3, Interesting)
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No, no they aren't mostly made in China actually.
Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand however yes.
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No, no they aren't mostly made in China actually.
Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand however yes.
Not quite. Seagate HDDs are produced in China, WD HDDs are produced in Thailand, Hitachi in China, no idea about Samsung but I'd be amazed if it wasn't Korea.
Recycling? (Score:4)
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.
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Well .. *I* have recycled my old hard drives... The magnets in server class hard drives are phenomenal. They make absolutely wonderful tool holders -- as long as the tool can become magnetized (and they do) without being a problem for you. You find yourself buying metal things just so you can hang them up easily... :)
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Tempest in a Teapot... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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They aren't rare at all and there are deposits across the USA. Purifying them is environmentally a nasty business, which is why China supplies them.
Off by a factor of ten (Score:2)
Why don't we just recycle old hard drives? (Score:2)
Seriously. Anyone have statistics on the number of hard drives produced over the years?
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if you're talking about removing the nickel cladding from the magnets, to get the material to make new different sized magnets and then reclad them, that's complicated process
there are companies that "recycle" them, but to be cost-effective they take a fee for "erasing" your data. and there's always "refurbished" drives.
Neodymium (Score:2)
Why is this a problem !? (Score:2)
no need for guaranteed purchase (Score:2)
As price rise, it will become profitable enough to reopen the mines in the US again.
Re:no need for guaranteed purchase (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't there a desolate, almost uninhabited desert in Peru just off the Pacific Ocean?
Aren't they pretty desperate?
Comes down to energy to run desalination to supply the water and political stability. Nice earthquake area so good fun for all, lets build a nuke or four to run the thing. Prove a modern nuke can run through a 8. Nobody but employees/contractors for a hundred miles. Show those Chinese how we do it the American way.
Re:Too important (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Too important (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Isn't that what fuel efficiency regulation is meant to encourage?
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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 a
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*puts on sunglasses*
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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.
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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
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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.
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But now there are many manufacturers:
Intel, OCZ, Kingston, Crucial, etc., etc.
inquiring mind I see... (Score:3)
You too, shall be honored to experience Alex Chiu's [burning sarcasm]miraculous discovery [magneticdiscovery.com].[/burning sarcasm]
(sorry, but you asked. yes, I am kidding.)
Re:inquiring mind I see... (Score:4, Funny)
why do i even bother trying to make an honest living...
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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..
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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.
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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.