Miscellaneous laptop discussions forum: Magnets Placed Near Laptops

Could you resend your message? It seemed to be empty.

I'm a magnet freak. And I have done some testing. I've proved that a magnet will not erase a VHS tape. And I've proved that a magnet will make a floppy unusable. And since a floppy and a hard drive use the same technology. . . But it all depends on the strength of the magnetic field.

It's good that you thought of this and asked the question. In closing, if it was mine, I'd remove the magnet.

The kind of magnet needed to damage a hard drive would be a large and powered electromagnet, with an oscillating field. It would also have to be fairly close to the laptop's bare hard drive, within a couple of inches. A simple refrigerator magnet, or one used to close cabinets, would never be capable of interfering with modern hard drives.

To give you an example, try taking an old hard drive apart, preferably one that's already broken. You'll find a ridiculously powerful pair of magnets ALREADY in that drive! Hard drive manufacturers use balanced magnetic fields from high-gauss rare-earth magnets for the drive's servo arm. Rarely in the consumer world will you find magnets that powerful, with several pounds of pulling force, in such a small area.

To make it short, don't worry about that little magnet. It cannot hurt your laptop.

(Oh, and once you pull those magnets out of that old hard drive, try not to put your skin in between the two. Some of those are powerful enough to pinch the bejeezus out of you.)

of erasing a hard drive by placing it at the bottom of the laptop or even the bare drive has the capability to do other damage as well. There are utilities that can do an adequate job. Some cost money....maybe even more than the drive itself.

MacBooks use two magnets to hold the lids closed, another one to keep the MagSafe power connector plugged in, and even one to hold the remote to the left side of the screen. So, in other words, don't worry!

I was on a Navy ship in 2002. Our ship had a "degaussing ring"; a magnetic field generator that consisted of three massive copper cables running the length of both sides of the ship. This functioned as a countermeasure to magnetic torpedoes and mines. When this thing was on, every CRT turned psychadelic colors and rippled like a Lava Lamp. Now THAT was a MAGNET! Still our computers hummed along merrily and in fact we had a server rack right up next to the the ring. Your hard drive will be sufficiently shielded by its outer case, and the chassis of the computer itself.

Hi..just here to say that last night I set my laptop on an open shelf door not realizing it had a magnet the size of a dime on it (thats how I ended up here). It wiped my harddrive clean...so it may not always be a problem..but even the tiniest magnets CAN be big problems. Good Luck.

It might just be a good idea not to bring a magnet near your laptop. The ones placed by the manufacturers must have been carefully placed in such locations judged to be 'SAFE'.

Recently, I had my BlackBerry Holster placed at the back of my Laptop monitor (the Laptop was on at the time) while I was trying to bring the Laptop, the BlackBerry and other stuffs upstairs from my living room. To my greatest chargrin, the monitor just went 'dark' instantly. I was later advised that the monitor is no friend of the Magnet.

Right now as I type, I am using an 'external light' to lighten up my monitor.

It happened to me, you don't want it to happen to you as well. I will keep trying to find a fix for my laptop but in the mean time, 'STAY SAFE'.