Question:What computer components are currently vulnerable to magnets? ?? ??(15 answers) ?? ???Closed 5 years ago. ?
Suppose my small brother is playing magnets near my Dell laptop.
Will a magnet wipe data from the hard drive, or otherwise irreversibly damage the hard drive?
Answer: While you can damage hard disks with magnets, it takes a very powerful magnet to do so.
As this article explains, any magnet that your brother was playing with won’t be large enough to do any damage:
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This myth was popularized by movies where hackers or criminals would ?quickly erase the contents of their hard disk drives with a few sweeps ?of a powerful magnet. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to do it ?with regular magnets, no matter how big they are.
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Every hard disk drive actually contains two powerful ?neodymium-iron-boron magnets that control the movements of the ?read/write heads. Yet the data on the platters remain unaffected. It ?will take a very, very powerful magnet to affect the data inside the ?hard disk drive.