Products and materials.

Enterprise server components

A rack server combines data-bearing drives, processors, memory, cooling and power supplies. Once its data is secured, each assembly becomes its own material stream.

Drive carriers slide out of the front of the chassis. Whatever their technology, data-bearing drives complete the sanitization or destruction their owner requires before reuse or recovery.

In this design, fans draw air through the chassis and across heat sinks that carry heat away from the processors. Heat sinks can combine aluminum and copper.

Memory modules, processors, expansion cards and the system board are circuit-board streams. Power supplies contain their own circuit boards, transformers and wiring.

Hard disk drive designs can contain rare-earth magnets; solid-state drives have no spinning disk. The drives a server actually uses determine which materials are available for recovery.

Magnets in hard disk drives

Rare-earth magnet applications include hard disk drives. Whether a specific drive contains one, and which alloy it uses, depends on the drive’s design.

Product documentation or material characterization identifies the magnet. Data security comes first: a drive completes its required sanitization or destruction before any recovery step.

How magnets can be recovered

1. Collected. Magnets from many products are gathered for recovery, once each product’s data, safety and handling requirements are met.
2. Broken down. Mechanical processing breaks magnets into fragments and granules.
3. Refined. Refining separates the rare-earth elements, typically as oxides. Iron and other materials leave as a separate stream.
4. Made new. Oxides can be converted to metals and alloys, then made into new magnets. Each is a separate industrial stage.