I have put most of my computer equipment in to some boxes, and put these boxes on to some new shelving in the garage. I want to cover the shelving with a thin plastic dust sheet. I had an idea how to attach this dust sheet to the metal shelving - use some magnets. But will magnets damage any of the mobos, graphics cards, memory, etc etc? Thanks for any comments.
Magnets will damage floppy and hard disks. So do not place your HDD's or floppy thingies near magnets.
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Floppies can be damaged, but harddisks are more resistant than you would expect.
If someone went looking for the strongest permanent magnets in your household, chances are high that they would be found in your harddisks. They are part of the mechanism which moves the heads over the platters.
See also this article.
Can I clarify something please? Are we talking about FDDs and HDDs, or just the data stored on them? For example, can a magnet damage a FDD? - I mean, the actual drive unit, not the floppy disk media. Also, if I put an unformated HDD next to some magnets, is there a remote possibility that the actual drive unit can get damaged? Thanks a lot.
In my experience, you'd have to be pretty deliberate to damage anything with magnets of the strength you're talking about.
I'm not sure how well they compare, but Mythbusters did an experiment to find out how strong a magnet you'd need to damage the magnetic strip of a credit card. IIRC, rare-earth magnets placed directly on the card couldn't cut it. In the end, they used some frack-off huge electromagnet to finally kill the card off.
As long as you're not putting these magnets directly on the floppy part of the floppy disks, you'll be fine.
There seems to be lots of cheap strong magnets for sale on ebay. This one, for instance -
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=220554552613
At the end of this advert, it gives a list of warnings. One of them is -
"Watches, computer monitors, televisions and mobile telephones can be seriously damaged by placing magnets near them."
Edit: I might get these magnets -
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=220554552620
They are ferrite, not neodymium. They have the same strength as fridge magnets. (The neodymium magnets are much stronger.) They are quite cheap.
wrote:There seems to be lots of cheap strong magnets for sale on ebay. This one, for instance - […]
There seems to be lots of cheap strong magnets for sale on ebay. This one, for instance -
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=220554552613
At the end of this advert, it gives a list of warnings. One of them is -
"Watches, computer monitors, televisions and mobile telephones can be seriously damaged by placing magnets near them."
Edit: I might get these magnets -
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=220554552620
They are ferrite, not neodymium. They have the same strength as fridge magnets. (The neodymium magnets are much stronger.) They are quite cheap.
Knowing that magnets are a total distraction to our mobile gadgets, we must have a serious discussion to prevent this. Encountering this kind of situation is common, therefore we should be guided on how to took care of our mobile things. However, I agree that magnets got really a serious damage and must be disregard.
jeanlery p. enierga
I used to have a large pair of speakers hooked up to my old Commodore A500 years ago and i always used to put my disks on top of them when swapping them over in the drive... I noticed after a while that some disks that worked fine would then be plagued with read errors! I then came to the conclusion that it could be the magnets in the speakers destroying them! I don't think magnetic shielding was very good back then 🤣
