This is good for two groups: Recyclers who dismantle by hand (and are able to recover magnets and other board level components), and the alleged African blood metals cartels who harvest tantalum from coltan in the mountains and rain forests of Congo, using the rare earths to fund their weapons and wars. Remember? The decline in gorilla population is tied to electronics rare metals demand.
The shortage may be of no use at all to the big USA shredders which shred up the hard drives. The magnets are difficult to recover - in fact they can cause jamming of the shredding gears (which are usually steel - and attractive to magnets).
As journalist Adam Minter noted in his Shanghai Scrap blog in January, removing rare earth magnets by hand disassembly actually can cut out the remelting and refining step altogether. Hard drives are manufactured in Singapore (a city-state, once part of Malaysia, now locked within it), and Singapore hard drive manufacturers will buy back magnets and reuse them directly.
That's right, they can glue the magnet right back into a new hard drive, it if's the right model etc. Or if it doesn't fit, there's the extra step of refining. But that is much easier than trying to get the Europium oxide, dysprosium oxide, etc.
