Just got a new 12" iBook. It’s small enough that it fits in one of the pockets of my large purse. I was planning to use this purse to carry it when I travel tomorrow. I just occurred to me that a friend at work had to have her CPU replaced because she had a magnet on it (or that’s what she was told). My purse has a magnetic clasp. (It’s a pretty strong magnet…) I’d planned to carry it in the pocket that’s farthest away from the clasp and will have a couple thin layers of fabric between it and the magnet as well as anything that’s in the other pocket. Am I risking anything doing this?
It’s nothing to worry about. You’d be surprised how much magnetic field strength is required to affect a hard drive. There are head actuating magnets inside drives that are very strong and they have no effect on the disk information.
I work for the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare and I’m pretty convinced that magnetic clasps are a major reason we have to make so many replacement benefit cards. We have people come in every two weeks because their card “stopped working”…while I can’t exactly point dramatically and scream “J’Accuse!” at them in the EBT room, it’s a pretty good bet that it’s either magnetic clasps on purses, magnets on keyrings, or leaving the damn things on top of their TV or stereo when they get it home.
Remember the Cecil column that decided that people were erasing their credit card strips with the magnetic clasps on their wallets? It does seem to happen.
Did you guys see the mythbusters where they tried to erase credit cards with a strong magnet? From the episode it looks to me like it is really hard to demagnitize cards.
It’s worth noting that that is a 1988 column, and both the resistance of the cards to demagnitization, and the design of magnetized wallet clasps may have changed since.
True, but that magnet (and the ones inside hard drives) are fixed in relation to the hard drive. I’d imagine that it’s only magnets that move relative to the computer might cause problems.