Magnetic materials are all around us, but many people don’t know how strong they can be. The strongest magnetic field in the world is produced by an electromagnet in Oxford, England. It has a strength of 4 teslas (T), which is about 20 000 times stronger than the earth’s magnetic field! If you think that sounds powerful, then you’ll definitely want to read this post where we talk about how strong hard drive magnets are and what they can do when they’re not being used for data storage.
Most hard drives use magnets that have a strength of between 0.5 and 1.5 T. This may not seem very strong in comparison to the Oxford electromagnet, but it’s actually more than enough to keep the drive’s read/write head firmly in place. If you’ve ever tried to remove a hard drive from its casing, you’ll know that it takes quite a bit of effort to do so. This is because the magnets are holding the head in place so tightly that it can take a lot of force to dislodge it.
Remove Hard drive while turned on
The magnets would overcome the force that’s holding them in place and the head would fly off the drive. This could potentially damage the drive’s read/write head, or even the platters themselves. For this reason, it’s always important to make sure that your hard drive is properly shut down before you try to remove it from its casing.
In addition to their use in hard drives, magnets can also be found in other consumer electronics devices such as loudspeakers, microphones, and electric motors. They’re also used in medical devices such as MRIs and pacemakers.
hard drive magnets made
Combination of neodymium, iron and boron that’s highly magnetized when formed into a particular shape. which has been designed to maximize its strength over a certain area rather than its overall strength. In fact, if you were able to stick two opposite poles of a magnet together and somehow hold them very still so that they don’t repel each other, you can pick up paperclips with them – this is how strong they are when forced together. Magnets also have a saturation point, which is the fact that as you bring two magnets closer together, they won’t get any stronger. In a hard drive magnet though, this point occurs when the magnet is about 2mm across – at this size it would be able to lift around 400 paperclips!
Where are the magnets in Hard drive
The magnets are located on the actuator arm, which moves the read/write head across the spinning disk platters.The magnets create a magnetic field that stores bits of data on the disk. Hard drives use multiple disks to store large amounts of data. The read/write head reads and writes data to the disks.
Magnets in hard drives are typically very strong – around 10,000 gauss. This is strong enough to hold a piece of paper against a fridge door. However, if you were to hold two opposite poles of a magnet close together, they would repell each other with force. So, in theory, if you had two magnets close together, they would fly apart. This is because the force produced by a magnetic field decreases with distance in a way that’s similar to the way the voltage from a battery falls off as you move away from it. The further away you get, the weaker it gets.
Hard Drive magnets strength
The strength of the magnet does not really matter as much as the metal used in the construction of the HDD platters (the disks). The metal used, most commonly referred to as Permallium , can either be very weak or very strong compared with other metals. It simply depends on where you buy your HDDs from.
The easiest way to find out how strong your drive’s magnets are would be by using a compass near where you store your drives. If the compass needle starts moving/shaking or pointing erratically, then you have a very strong magnet. If the needle just slightly moves, then you have a normal magnetic hard drive. Lastly, if there is no movement at all from your compass needle when it detects the presence of another magnet near it, then your drive would be considered “low-level” and could not pose much threat to you or whatever electronic device you have nearby.
In conclusion: the strength of the material used for HDD platters does matter. The stronger the material, the more dangerous it is in terms of what damage (if any) it can cause to humans and electronics in close proximity to them.
