Will a Magnet Erase my PC's Hard Drive? - Let's Find Out 

"minecraft, that should eat up some cpu" (9% CPU Usage)

6:24 the reason for the disks slowing down is because the magnet induces currents inside the disks (only possible when spinning) and those currents create opposing magnetic fields slowing down the disks. if it were the actuator arm getting attracted to the disks it would have destroyed itself in a second (head crash)

magnet.exe can take 100% disk now try it on a ram

Internally is magnets for the head actuator. These magnets are actually extremely strong rare Earth or neo magnets. But what would happen when adding a magnet is the head can no longer respond correctly because the magnetic field for the head has moved. Running a game and running Windows will run from memory while doing your tests, so this is why it will continue to run even with a magnet on it. But the impact and the shift on the head can cause the head to scrape the platter. It takes serious magnetic fields to pull the material on the platters. Now, a microwave will kill it extremely fast. But know you know why EM Pulses are not used as weapons for war, since it would only effect power, and it takes serious power to do any damage. We are inside massive magnetic fields all day, and things are built to withhold against magnetic fields large enough to be felt from the moon.

Totally enjoy your video and the content of them. Great job as always.

I've often wondered about this since I have memories of accidentally ruining a reel-to-reel tape years ago. Thanks!

You should use a fishing magnet with 1000 lb magnetic force.

It is about how further the magnetic fields extend. Magnetic fields get weaker exponentially with more distance. Weak magnets will destroy the data too, if you rub them on the platter. Correct me if i am wrong. Because i don't know much about this myself. Physics Girl did something like that to a card(debit, credit i dunno, it was magnetic stripe) instead of hard drive.

When all the apps loaded up it was because you tried to open stuff while it was frozen therefore unfreezing it after you took it off.

You have to use a strong alternating magnetic field (AC electromagnet). That's what they use for industrial degaussers.

As a kid I dissected some 3.5" disks to see what physical damage would do to the data. That stuff was pretty rugged was my conclusion.

Maybe only your magnet overpowerd the 2 magnets who help the reader arm and prevented the arm working correctly. HDD's slowed because the magnet pulls the disks up and giving it resistance against the dis center holders.

Excellent! Makes one wonder why the disk slowed down with the magnet near. Very interesting Matt!

The cover of every HDD I have disassembled is magnetically shielded. Put as strong a magnet as you like right on it. But uncovered, that's a different story. It does require a strong magnet, but guess what, every voice coil actuated disk drive has two extremely powerful neodymium magnets right there.

the platter spinning down, to me seems like the magnet was interfering with the motor feedback winding. iirc the drives circuitry is looking at the actual real time speed of the platter and position of the arm, adding the magnet slowed the platter because the feedback data was not what it was expecting, attempting to correct platter speed and getting the data it wants (platter speed) to a range it accepts.

the hard drive has a failsafe that's why it slowed down and everything froze until you took away the magnet

The best way to quickly kill te Harddrive is to put the magnet at the PCB side. That way, the Magnetic field can penetrate much easily through the casing o the disk platters. The Top casing has a machnetic shield.

I think there was a mechanical impact as well as a magnetic force on the working hard disk.

Maaan... seriously... That scene where you put your fingers near that 7200 RPM thin disk chilled me to the bone. Watch out my dude I bet that thing is sharp. Maybe you can test this later, try cutting something with it.

The reason that the programs all started up when u took away the magnet is because the disc started spinning very slowly when u bringed the magnet close.

Now I want to play Minecraft

Some of the things that are slowing the disk are: The disruption of the motor magnetic field. And the interaction of the magnet and the aluminium disk. If you want more info on that watch this ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sENgdSF8ppA.html (He is using cooper instead of aluminium but the way the react to magnets are the same)

Him:Opened Minecraft In Just A Few Seconds. Me:Open up Minecraft In 10 Minutes. WHAT THE F*Q!

keep an eye on the disk usage on the task manager

in order for a magnet to frik up a hard drive you need to put it on the little pins near the disk, pulling them up and scratching the disk. you where just putting it on the disk

We have a magnet at work for killing drives. Just plug it in and wait 15 minutes. We use bleach bit for ssd drives.

SSD Drives are not affected by magnets at all no matter how powerful it is it wont disrupt the data on SSDs

Wow, I was thinking that you were just slowing the disk because of overall magnetic metal (even if the platters are metal-coated glass). But if that's from the individual bit domains then that would be pretty amazing! However, then I'd have the question of how the data doesn't blend with itself if its that strong!

WP: ahh! Minecraft! Me: Yesss! Me when it loads: Oh, bedrock edition... Bedrock doesn't take up as much CPU as java because its meant to run on tablets, phones, etc.

great work I was still thinking that magnet will destroy HDD

It just locked up the reader arm in the HDD so it couldn't move. Once you removed the magnet it could move again so it opened everything. Edit. Lol sorry I posted this before the end when you said the same thing lol

It isn’t strange, the magnet just keeps the hdd head on 1 place so it won’t move

The magnet didn't cause it to load all that stuff. All that stuff loaded because you were clicking on everything and the computer was trying to process the commands and was unable to do so with the magnet in place so once you removed it, everything that you had spam clicked opened up

"It's still accessing the disk, no problem." Nope, because despite the terminology used by that stat software, which doesn't know what kind of storage you're using, an SSD has NO disk.

The metal enclosure blocks magnetic fields a bit

Am I the only one who noticed that his SSD said OOOF on it?

Oops, I just got reminded that I've already watched and commented on this video 4 years ago, haha! But I did add some new ones that I didn't make last time, heh, and I also replied to your replies to my old comments.

What if you just stopped the disk from spinning with a heavy object or something?

The reason nothing worked and then it worked is because the magnet was forcing the disk to move the way it wanted and the. When you removed the magnet the disks could spin at a readable speed again

you wave the magnet above its head while it's writing, obviously. you'll overwrite important stuff :P

Now we can sleep soundly knowing that putting magnetic decorations on our hard drives will not do anything to it!

That was not weird. Windows could not open the programs while the disk was at 100%. All those programs were simply windows catching up with your instructions.

However I don't think playing minecraft is the best to see if the hard drive is working. Cause the game is already loaded on the RAM. Interesting video none the less.

Copy files instead of playing Minecraft, it’s a tiny game it could all be cached in memory. Otherwise good experiment.

The strong magnet, dont kill the disk data, but this magnet is interfere for reading head i guess.

I think what happened with the strongest magnet is that it pulled the disks up towards itself, making reading and writing impossible.

-I can feel the hard drive working- *Are you powered up by hard drives?*

Pretty sure you're talking about the movie "The Core"

Hard drive *heavy breathing*

There is a neodymium magnet inside a hard drive, so it should erase everything all the time if you think like this.

The only thing i am concerned about is the minecrsft version... You sure it didnt work?

The biggest problem is the impact when putting the magnet on. This can cause a head crash

Modern HDDs have magnetic domains on the platter that are too small and powerfully magnetized to affect with typical permanent magnets. If you are looking to destroy the data in a way such that it positively cannot be recovered, you need to physically destroy the platters. Thermite works well for this purpose, but just putting the drive in an oven that can exceed the curie point of the media will do quite the number on the magnetic domains on the disc (even if the drive remains otherwise intact). SSDs, being more-or-less immune to static magnetic fields, would require thermite to totally destroy.

has 750gb hdd as daily driver *sees 1tb hdd getting destroyed* 😧😨

Guy: *puts magnet on hard drive* Guy: nothing, still working! Drive: *0 disk usage*

The disk slowed down when you put 40lb magnet over it due to developing of eddy currents in the disk which tried to oppose its rotational motion

I placed a magnet on my laptop and it stopped working RIP

3:25 hahah, that's how my pc works

Lenz's Law. Though the Aluminum platters don't attract the magnet on their own, the magnet induces a magnetic field in the platter, attracting the magnet and creating resistance (slowing the platter). Similar to how if you drop a strong magnet through an aluminum tube, it floats slowly through on it's way down. I guess the harddrive senses the slowdown and pauses activity until the motor can spin it back up to normal speed.

The strong magnet was likely just preventing the read head from properly moving across the platters surface and didn't effect the polarity of stored data. Now a powerful electromagnet on the other hand could invert some bits of data.

"disk begging for help at 100% usage" *opens Google Chrome* do you wanna blow up a city or what? you can't be doing that

Aha, the old “Rare Earth magnet while playing Minecraft in a garage” test. A classic to be sure.

the movie you watched was called "the core" :-D

This is crazy, I put a horseshoe magnet on a hard disk back around 2005 (it was already an old drive then probably from around 1998) and it erased it completely. There was nothing left of any file on there. They managed to proof a harddrive against that 🤔

HDDs work via magnetic coating on a ceramic or glass disk, you would need around 140 pounds of force to magnetically erase one. SSDs work via chips that hold electrical charge, a magnet isn't going to do anything unless you're using it to smash the drive, the best way to kill an SSD would be to remove the charge or overload it.

It's really cool that you took the time to try some of this, but really what you're demonstrating is interfering with how the disks operate; i.e- you stopped the drive from being able to physically spin and read/write normally, which is why the PC locked up then resumed again, rather than showing any kind of corruption. If you want to show corruption then the easiest way would be to fill the disk with large files, and generate checksums for these. After attempting to corrupt the disk, you can then generate the checksums again to see if they changed, which would indicate corruption. Admittedly not as amusing to watch though 😉

Okay, that was unexpected. When I was in the Military, we used to destroy drives with a box that you put the drive in and then it zapped them with an EMP. That was military grade.

all the magnetic field is for is controlling the read/write apparatus. it works much like a speaker's voice coil. all you are doing is interfering. also the enclosure is shielded, that's why no effect until you bring a really strong magnet.

Me: *Laughs in SSD*

My guess is that the magnet merely held the read/write head in place, preventing it from moving, without changing any of the data. The computer acted wonky because the hard drive suddenly disappeared.

What if we use electro magnet. In one of the episode in 'Breaking bad' they destroy the evidence using strong electro magnetic. Is that possible?

4:00 You just killed the disk by impact not from the magnetic field. The metal in which the disk is encased is a type of metal that reflects magnetic fields, nothing magnetic can get through it (I don't remember the name of the metal now). But if you hit the disk while it's operating, 1G could easly misalign the heads and you will have that behaviour. The previous hit also made some damage and thats why you saw a little increment in disk usage. On the other hand, the disk usage meter doesn't measure usage, just amount of pending read/write operations. When you hit it the previous time it probably lost some RPMs and resetted the heads position and maybe some damage went into the disk itself so R/W was slower. Last hit could make the heads hit he disk, slowing it down or scratch the plates hardly. Some disks, when the RPMs drop just stop for protection. I hope you didn't make the recovery into the same disk xD

By the way, when the magnet is there in your HDD. that’s how usually my PC responds with no magnet...

Minecraft helped the Hdd live.

The movie he is referring to is called "The Core".

Next is the blue magnet. Here is the blue magnet. I will put the blue magnet on the disk. Here is the blue magnet on the disk. Why do you talk like a kid's book?? 🤣🤣🤣 Maybe you should check for disk errors, instead of relying on a game that's loaded into RAM. 💁‍♂️

Your more likely to break your drive by the impacts you were doing to it. You have to be careful with shocking it to make sure the test is not tainted. I know this because I've been working on them changing out heads to recover data from them.

This isn't how computers work. If you want to do a proper experiment, begin copying a large file while exposing the HDD to increasing large magnetic fields. Minecraft (or any other program already loaded into memory) isn't going to be affected by magnetism to the hard drive since, at the time of execution, it's no longer ON the hard drive...it's in memory.

8:13 ssd*

Yeah I saw this coming, thankfully modern HDDs are pretty durable cause I once set a 100lb strength rare-earth magnet right on top of my laptop's HDD without thinking and it locked to the metal laptop surface and I heard the drive making a very distressed sound, but after I quickly pulled it off everything was fine and I got another year out of the drive before it started acting up (which may have just been age).

All you have seen was in RAM, the magnet only damage the mechanism of the HDD.

4:24 The most beautiful thing ever

A 100 pound per square inch would destroy the hardware

I am pretty sure that in the movie you watched the hacker used an electromagnet which has a job of wiping disks and ruining tech.

*FBI wants to know your location*

It's actually the servo motor which is getting affected due to magnetic field

this is why SSDs are better

I think eddy currents may have slowed down the disk, they don't have a very strong motor anyways

Me:watch movie Minecraft Mom and dad:mad Me:i have command block Me: revome mom and dad Succvel

Byte 6d65 no it was just the fysical shock from the magnet hitting the hdd. A hit with a stone would have had that same effect. The readhead on the arm skips some tracks and the hdd has to find his track and required speed for it again and thats all of the delay, all thats seen here. And indeed, there is a supetstrong neodyniummagnet half an inch beside the platter inside the cover. That cover that diverts the strong enough fieldlines to destroy data easally around the platter.

4:10 "Try To Open Up Bowser"😮😮

Hello, I like your content. Like from me. And the 1000 comment. 1k comment is mine.

ah its refreshing to see someone that doesnt try to dramatise everything and fill the video up with unnecessary junk. but rather just do what they set out to do and accept whatever outcome there is. you have my respect and a new sub.

Im surprised that the pc is still running and the powersupply is not dead. when looking at it 2 of the GPU's are connected with molex to pcie connectors. They are also somehow running considering that only the six pin is plugged in for the reference cards. im in disbelieve that it even works. You should probably get a better Powersupply or get rid of some cards since the mining craze is basically dead.

Opening up a hard drive will certainly destroy it. Did you close the drive up and test it? At the end of the video you said the computer was still working but that hard drive didn't sound like it's working. That sounded like the "click of death". Not a good sound. That sound usually means that the drive is failing.

Warped perception: 40 pound magnet me: price or weight??

Breaking bad fans like here 👍

yes sir ,just magnet strong neodimium magnet , and hdd have same type magnet to,

*Nice. I can use magnet now to lag a system physically!*