Can a (notebook) hard drive be affected by magnets, such as those in a headphone or a cell phone'?

Question

I would like to carry the notebook computer around, together with the ear-bud headphones and the cell phone. But since ear-bud headphones have magnets into it, can't it affect the notebook's hard drive?

I think cellphone is more common for people to carry around with their notebook, except cellphone is usually in the pants' pocket or on the belt on the waist...

Answer 1

There are speaker boxes inside most notebook machines which are far more powerful than those within earbuds or cell phones. Many people put additional speakers around their machine to have better (or at least louder) sound output.

The rumours that you could destroy floppies when you accidentally put them onto your speaker boxes seem to linger still. ;-) Don't worry, though. Unless you expose your machine to serious magnetism (anything that would visibly distort a CRT display or worse) you'll be fine. The notebook's chassis and the drive's case will shield off quite a lot, and the platter materials are far better today than they were in the past.

Just don't worry, for any possible everyday use you'll be safe.

Answer 2

Hard drives themselves have some of the more powerful magnets available to control the read-write head and are completely impervious to anything you could set on them.

See this article from PCWorld busting PC myths: http://www.pcworld.com/article/116572/busting_the_biggest_pc_myths.html

The only magnets powerful enough to scrub data from a drive platter are laboratory degaussers or those used by government agencies to wipe bits off media. "In the real world, people are not losing data from magnets," says Bill Rudock, a tech-support engineer with hard-drive maker Seagate. "In every disk," notes Rudock, "there's one heck of a magnet that swings the head."

And as far as flash drives/cards go:

A magnet powerful enough to disturb the electrons in flash would be powerful enough to suck the iron out of your blood cells

You can see the magnets in a hard drive as a large silver piece screwed down on the other side of the read-write head on this page: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/hard-disk6.htm

Answer 3

The magnets in the headphones wouldn't be strong enough to crash a Hard drive, whereas a magnet from full blown loud speakers may. You'll be fine carrying them with your notebook.

Most HDD crashes are due to them being knocked around or something.

Answer 4

Neither a cellular phone nor earbuds will harm your hard disk, unless you open the case and disassemble the drives first. Even then you'd probably have to scratch the platters.