Does the magnet erase the hard drive data?

'Don't put a magnet near your laptop, drive it badly,' this is a good advice for many people, but is it true?

Many people believe that the data on the mechanical hard drive will be erased if placed near a magnet. This is because mechanical hard drives have ferromagnetic moving parts and store data with magnetic fields that can be affected by magnets.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) do not have any moving parts, and do not rely on magnetic fields to store data, so they are not affected by magnets.

K&J Magnetics members used an old laptop at the office to perform an experiment to understand the effect of magnets on hard cells. They used a standard fridge magnet, some stronger cube magnets, and a neodymium magnet from a 2.5-inch mechanical hard drive placed on a flash drive, a hard drive in the laptop, and an external hard drive.

The magnets in turn are placed on the chassis of the laptop and move back and forth. After experimenting with all three types of magnets, the data was not lost and the laptop's functions were not affected.

The magnets are also placed on the thin plastic frame of the external hard drive and moved back and forth. After that, the hard drive is attached to the PC and all data remains intact.

Finally, the flash drive and the results showed that no data was lost at all.

In 2004, CompactFlash director Bill Frank once stated that, although mechanical hard drives are less resistant to interference, that doesn't mean they can be easily erased by a magnet. To destroy electrons in a flash memory requires a source of energy so strong that it can . pull iron out of human blood cells!

See more:

1. How to recover deleted data on the computer
2. Restore deleted drive partitions with Active Partition Recovery