What computer components are currently vulnerable to magnets?

Question

When I first started using computers, law of the land in computer class was never bring magnets near anything computer related, lest you lose all your data or screw up your monitor.

Now I am pretty sure magnets will still royally mess up a standard hard drive, and I know for a fact they screw up a CRT monitor.

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.

Is it the power of the magnet preventing data loss or the sheer fact that whatever memory type in the phone is immune to it?

What about ear buds, as I know those have tiny magnets in them. Are those capable of damaging any electronic device currently in use?

I'm wondering if I'm being paranoid, but I really am not sure what magnets will damage and what they won't!

Is there a list, or rule of thumb for determining what will be hurt by magnets and what won't be?

Answer 1

A list or rule? Sure, anything that uses electro-magnetism to function could, and would be affected by magnets. The question is what the detrimental effects, if any, would be and how strong and close do the magnets need to be. Generally the two most questioned items are the monitor and disk drives.


LCD/LED monitors are not generally susceptible to magnetic interference like CRTs are because they function completely differently (remember, CRTs use magnets to deflect the electron beam, so an external magnet would obviously mess with that).

Hard-drives are also not affected by magnets because of the way they function. You can research the details on how hard-drives work for a more thorough understanding, but the easy answer is that there is a very powerful magnet inside each hard-drive that controls the read-write head’s movement. That’s why some people like to rip open dead drives to get at the sweet, gooey super-strong magnet inside. If that magnet that is inside the drive, and right beside the platters doesn’t wipe them, then any magnet that you are likely to have around isn’t going to.

As for flash drives, they are a different technology altogether so they are not going to get erased.

There is one component however that is indeed affected by magnets that most people miss: cables. While many cables are shielded, some are not and thus susceptible to a magnetic field. For example, a cable connecting the sound card to the speaker may be shielded, but the little cable connecting the CD/DVD drive to the sound card usually isn’t and ingress of a magnetic field could cause interference. Or, while rounded IDE cables (especially for IDE133) are usually shielded, ribbons usually aren’t and even at speeds of 66/100 could be affected enough to cause some corruption or at least reduce performance due to re-tried reads/writes.


I would say that modern systems are not really vulnerable anymore because as time progresses, science and knowledge advances, but unfortunately that’s not sufficient. While that may be true, in the old days things were done right a lot more than today with all the cut corners and cost-reducing measures (eg NVIDIA’s “Bumpgate”).

Anyway, the point is that when it comes to modern computers (I’m counting floppy disks as not-modern), you don’t really need to worry about magnets. You can breath a sigh of relief. :)

Answer 2

Hard drives, RAM chips, power supply, anything electrical can be vulnerable to magnetic fields.

In common practice it's not all that harmful unless you're doing it on purpose. Case in point is the magnet MacBooks come with built in to use with the power supply.

Answer 3

I've passed a standard size 512GB HDD through a magnet strong enough that I couldn't pull a chunk of metal off it, and it functioned absolutely fine afterwards (And does to this day, as far as I know) - I think it's safe to say hard drives aren't that susceptible anymore.

(CW because this is, obviously, not proof of any kind, just my experience. I do not endorse the using of magnets on 512GB HDDs, use them to store media or something if you really don't want it :P)

Answer 4

You're being paranoid. It would take a pretty significant magnet to permanently affect most parts of a computer these days. As long as you're not working around industrial magnets, or sticking things to the side of your case with powerful rare earth magnets, you should be fine.

Answer 5

Rarely a problem anymore. Higher bit-density requires higher coercivity, which results in greater resistance to "accidental" magnetism. Old single density floppies could be wiped out if you ran them over with a vacuum cleaner. Newer hard drives are quite resistant to erasure from anything you're likely to have laying near the computer at home...

Answer 6

At my work we found an old floppy disk with a pretty powerful magnet stuck to it that'd been that way for years. I could still read off the floppy just fine.

Answer 7

For the most part, none. The typical magnetic fields we encounter every day are not a significant issue for most electronic devices. For example, speakers are electromagnetic devices, and they are often mounted on laptops very close to other computer parts without any problems.

Most electronics can be damaged, however, by strong and rapidly changing magnetic fields. As I've written in this answer, changing magnetic fields cause electromagnetic induction, and if sufficiently strong, could cause the circuits to carry damaging amounts of electrical power. However, this isn't going to happen under normal operation, and speakers (which do generate changing, although weak, magnetic fields on top of a permanent magnet) and other household and office magnetic objects is not a significant concern.

Hard drives are quite resistant to outside magnetic fields despite internally relying on minute magnetic fields to store data. 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.

Answer 8

If it's electric it can be affected my magnets.

That said most electronics today is pretty well shielded so if you don't stick your magnet to stuff or let it rub against it for a prolonged time you should be pretty safe.

And your phone does not use magnetism to store data on a disk, it uses an internal flash card.

The only thing that I can think of that could (in a reasonably scenario) be hurt by a magnet is floppies and cards with magnetic strips.

This is of course with normal household magnets.

Answer 9

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.

Answer 10

I had a friend who had a bunch of HDDs that he swap in and out like DVDs. 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. I can't copy the text but you can read about it in page 5 of this article = http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=84&pgno=5

Answer 11

hard drives and crt would probably be mostly severely affected.

i suspect the most would need some kind of modulating magnetic field to create sufficient inductive properties

Answer 12

There's a similar question on Yahoo! Answers:

Do Magnets damage Electronics?

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.

Best Answer

Magnets can an do harm ANY magnetic media....tapes (audio & video), minidiscs.

They WILL also harm hard drives, static memory (cell phones, Ipods).

I would put your static devices somewhere away from any magnetic fields such as speakes as well.

Answer 13

Heres my experience with "pretty strong" magnet put at the back of my Motorola X Play phone:

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. When I speak of Android UI, I speak of the launcher.

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

EDIT: Confirmed, the bottom of my touch screen on my Motorola XT1563 is unusable when my phone is docked. Workaround is rebooting the phone while keeping it docked or get a new docking system.

Answer 14

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.

Answer 15

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.