Can magnets damage or wipe a laptop hard drive?

Question

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?

Solution 1

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:

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.

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.

Solution 2

Science and a little bit of logic

I was curious about this, and as always on the internet, results are mixed.

There's a video here where a bunch of kids manage to do it with an aquarium magnet. I don't think its the magnetism that killed the hard drive, and its possible that its just a really old system. They tried smaller fridge magnets, and eventually a magnet the size of a blackboard duster used to clean aquariums. The system froze, and didn't detect the drive on the next boot at all .I'd note that the whole drive died as opposed to data loss, and that's not what one would expect from the myth, I'd expect weird failures but the drive being detected. Its probably a good example of this myth. I'd note though that typical smaller magnets were entirely harmless even if this were a valid example, and that the magnet is right on top of a running hard drive, and moved across, something hardly likely to happen by accident.

There's a seriously strong magnet pair inside your hard disk to actuate the 'voice coil'. However the layout is designed so that there's a VERY strong field between the parallel magnets and less outside. The presence of magnets inside a hard disk may not necessarily mean that its safe.

Someone's tried this at kj magnetics (link stolen from Michael Frank's comments, with his permission) and found that it didn't really wipe data. They tried a range of magnets, and as a magnet retailer, they probably have the good stuff.

I assumed that the casing of the hard drive would provide some degree of shielding, but the link reports that there might have been some deflection of the hard drive platters with stronger magnets. If you put the powerful enough magnet in the right place, you might cause a head crash, which is very very fun.

However the data itself seemed to be fine - and the explanation is that in creating smaller and smaller magnetic domains, they needed materials that were harder to 'flip' the magnetic state of by accident (so higher coercivity). As such they're also more resistant to magnets than older media.

Guttmann's paper on secure deletion of data has a nice table of these

Typical Media Coercivity Figures
______________________________________
Medium                      |Coercivity
5.25" 360K floppy disk      |300 Oe
5.25" 1.2M floppy disk      |675 Oe
3.5" 720K floppy disk       |300 Oe
3.5" 1.44M floppy disk      |700 Oe
3.5" 2.88M floppy disk      |750 Oe
3.5" 21M floptical disk     |750 Oe
Older (1980's) hard disks   |900-1400 Oe
Newer (1990's) hard disks   |1400-2200 Oe
1/2" magnetic tape          |300 Oe
1/4" QIC tape               |550 Oe
8 mm metallic particle tape |1500 Oe
DAT metallic particle tape  |1500 Oe 

Which pretty clearly reflects why a old school floppy disk or tape was more susceptible to this kind of thing, and a modern HDD is not. Its plausible modern drives may have even higher coercivity.

That said, your laptop itself has a certain degree of magnetic shielding (your HDD caddy is sheet steel probably and there's a lot of metal panels and frames in a laptop. Chances are any magnet powerful enough to nuke your HDD would also be dangerous, and possibly cause your brother to loose a finger or two by accident when it gets attracted to something solid and steel, or worse another magnet. So... your brother should not be playing with magnets if they are strong enough to wipe your hard drive. However I'd be worried about your brother's fingers more than the hard drive.

There is however a way to destroy electrical components with a magnet. With a strong enough moving magnetic field, you might just might induce a current strong enough to burn out some component. Once again, this would need a VERY strong current, and very specific circumstances. As a kid, I once blew out a PSU by moving a pair of hard disk magnets along the power cord. Not recommended.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to see if they can turn a door into a giant degausser or cause a head crash with a magnet on a HDD.

Chances are, its unlikely the regular household magnets you'd find commonly would do any harm.

Comments

[Michael Frank]

The magnets are not going to steal your data. See this article here: kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=hard-drive-destruction

[Keltari]

Your laptop has several magnets inside which are probably stronger than the ones he is playing with.

[Giacomo1968]

The fear of magnets comes from the early days of computing and floppy disks. Nowadays unless you are playing with a very strong magnet right on top of the drive itself, then the risk is minimal to none.

[Jamie Hanrahan]

Here's another answer (he said bashfully). Short version: No. superuser.com/a/840600/348119

[Giacomo1968]

Just an FYI regarding your initial post—which I edited—that cited your dad. I’m sure you dad does good work as an instructor, but unless you can provide a link to something he wrote to expound on the topic, casual knowledge like that is not a “source.” As for the rest of the answer, this all reads as a comment. An industrial grade degausser is not the same as small personal magnets. And the points you are making just repeats what others have said.

[Thalys]

Peter Guttmann's paper is a great read on the topic cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html Most of it's outdated but it explains the 35 pass myth, and the important aspects of doing a proper wipe. These days though, on a old school hard drive, a single pass is often enough I'm told.

[matega]

I didn't watch the video, but it should be possible for data corruption on the platters to render a drive not only corrupted, but fully non-functional (i.e. not even detected). The hard disk controller may store part of its firmware on the reserved sectors of the disk, so it may fail to bring up its SATA/IDE interface properly.

[Ramhound]

Indeed. Honestly the simplest solution to secure a HDD which will be decommissioned is to wipe the drive, then use full disk encryption on it, then wipe the drive. This way any data that is recovered would be encrypted data, since every sector is read then written, it is an effective solution. This suggestion really only works on mechanical HDDs, SSDs with over provisioning, are an entirely different beast. Any full disk encryption solution is fine, encryption is encryption, the point is to write noise over the real (old) data.

[Gusdor]

I've actually seen this happen in the wild with fairly powerful but reasonably sized rare earth magnets. The laptop was rendered unusable and had to be repaired

[Giacomo1968]

@Ramhound is full disk encryption really encrypting the full volume when the disk is blank? I always assumed the way a container encryption would work like that is to create a sparse disk image that then grows as data is added. Meaning, yes new data being written to the new partition will be encrypted, but the rest of the free space—while not partitioned—might still be readable to someone with the right tools.