Why do magnets damage computers

Maybe we heard it as a child in school or as we got older within our business circles and industries. Put simply, no — a magnet can not harm your laptop.

Especially when it comes to the average magnets found around our office spaces. As stated earlier, it would take a massively strong magnet to cause even the slightest problem with a hard drive. Though they might not be as popular as years past, CDs are still a great format to listen to music on but a magnet cannot erase a CD, DVD or even a flash drive or other external drive for that matter. Magnets are incredible useful objects that are utilized for a number of diverse applications.

If you have more questions about magnets, contact the experts at Jobmaster Magnets. And make sure you set the record straight the next time someone tells you a magnet can damage a laptop! Maybe we heard it as a child in school or as we got older within our business circle The case of the hard drive provides resistance against electromagnetic induction and transient magnetic fields because it is conductive and therefore acts as a Faraday cage. From my experience, very little damage can be expected unless you get a strong magnet near an unshielded coil of some sort that's on a circuit board.

This can significantly disrupt the magnetic field that surrounds this component, at least enough to change the voltages that it is involved with cleaning or adjusting. It most likely won't 'fry' a circuit, but it could cause it to over-heat due to voltage changes which could lead to component damage and board failure. Case in point, I added a strong magnet to the bottom of a USB hub so it would stay in one place on top of my computer case.

After a while I noticed that it was getting significantly hotter than the exact same hub that didn't have a magnet attached to its base. After removing the magnet, it went back to normal fortunately. Contrary case: I have a terrific battery tester, 'Batt-O-Meter', that "loads" the battery being tested, then processes some additional information to give you not only the actual voltage in digital form , but it also indicates the effective percentage of power left in the battery, a more significant factor when you're considering how much longer a battery will last, or how efficient your rechargeable batteries are at being charged.

I attached the magnet to the main 'positive' post on the device so any battery I'm testing will stay connected to that post with little effort by me while I'm using both hands; one to press a button and hold the battery, while holding the wired probe against the 'negative' post.

I've been checking whether there has been any deviation of the resulting readings due to the magnet and so far there hasn't been, and of course, no over-heating as in the other case. There's no way to tell how much interference will occur until you do a trial with and without the battery in the vicinity of the device. Momentary exposure will surely not hurt most circuits.

One day we were fooling around with some magnetic balls he bought from China and dropped some on two of his HDDs. We figured they were gone but he plugged them in and they were alive and well. He did some research and learned that this is just a myth because HDDs have very strong magnets inside.

Do Magnets damage Electronics? I have a few electronic devices that have cases that have those magnet that help close and lock the case but I was wondering since the device is right next to my mp3 player or cellphone does it do any harm to them?

Because sometimes you see in movies the magnet damages the memory or something. HDD's can still be affected by magnets, but only if you're doing it on purpose. For instance, we had a little hand-held tape degausser built for VHS tapes that we would use on HDD's after doing a secure wipe, and before donating them.

If the 7-pass bit flipping party wasn't enough, the hand-held degausser probably was - it made the platters vibrate in their casing. I can't imagine that the little bits on each of the platters weren't somewhat disturbed by this violent cataclysm of magnetism. Sure, it's not like the old days when your mom could erase your C64 floppy disk by running the vacuum too close to it on the floor, but the point is you can , you're just not likely to do it on accident.

Unless you drop a can of rare-earth bucky-balls on the HDD while it's spinning, or re-enact the laptop destruction scene from Breaking Bad. As hard drives store data with an alternating magnetic field, a nearby single magnet is, if anything, going to alter the magnetism of the entire disk equally, meaning that the field will still alternate in the correct pattern to represent the data.

I bought an Aukey air vent phone holder which uses magnets to keep your phone docked. Each time I was getting in my car, my phone freezes when it was docked. So I thought at first it was my programming scripts that uses bluetooth detection to trigger actions , so I turned off all those scripts. Didn't fix the issue. Then I thought it was software related meaning, an app installed on my phone that was causing the issue so yeah..

I had reset my phone. Without success, the issue was still happening. Then I reinstalled all my apps, started my scripts again and the issue was still hapenning. So I did that 5 times, used my phone but without docking it one of the magnet was still glued to the back of my phone. Then when I wasn't docking it, everything was working flawlessly. As soon as I dock it, the Android UI freezes.

Everything else seemed to be working just fine. I was able to trigger the "shut down" menu by pressing the power button and I was able to scroll down the top menu where you can trigger wifi, bluetooth etc. Is it really related I don't know. But it looks like it cause it was the contact with the two magnets that was causing the issue and if I rebooted the phone while keeping it docked, everything went fine but as soon as I undocked it and redocked it, bang, the phone freezes again.

Also, I know for fact that it will affects your compass. Hope this helps. Workaround is rebooting the phone while keeping it docked or get a new docking system.

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Learn more. What computer components are currently vulnerable to magnets? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 8 months ago.

Active 4 years, 2 months ago. Viewed 34k times. Though I am also pretty sure they do not screw up a LCD monitor? Now I have my phone which uses magnets to determine if it's docked, and it made me wonder. Improve this question. Hennes Brett Allen Brett Allen 1, 2 2 gold badges 11 11 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges. As they ramped it up the display would twist to one side by about 10 degrees. Hit "degauss" on the monitor front panel, ::blur:: then return and all would be well.

Later, they'd ramp down, and the monitor would twist the other way Leave you wallet in your pocket and walk into the hall while they were doing that and you'd loose the data on the magnetic stripes on all your cards Thanks everyone for your answers, really helped me gain a better understanding. Once a series of particles has changed states -- switched from zero to one or vice-versa -- and the operating system or hard drive operating software are not informed, then the data is essentially deleted; no program with scrambled data can run effectively, and no information can be reliably read.

One thing to consider when thinking about magnets and hard drives is the "coercivity" of the magnet. The coercivity of any magnetic field is the amount of magnetic force of the opposite polarity is required to demagnetize that field.

The substance on the platters, being a magnetic substance, has a particular coercivity that, should a powerful enough magnetic field exert force on the platter, the platters could lose magnetic force and the data be erased.

Hard drive research has focused on maintaining drives in the face of outside forces such as magnets. The coercive factor of modern hard drives far exceeds the force of household magnets: the demagnetization of a modern hard drive requires a super-powered magnet called a "degaussing" machine. These magnets do not affect the plates because the plates are so resistant to demagnetization. The risk of damaging a hard drive from magnetization as part of normal usage is very slight.