If magnets damage a computer, why aren’t phones damaged by magnetic mounts?
In: 1219
Years ago, I worked as a tech helping loan consultants with their laptops for Washington Mutual.
It was realized at one point that the data on the hard disks might be recoverable even from apparently dead drives. We were returning the drives to the manufacturer under warranty. Some of the data was possibly worth millions, so that had to be dealt with.
The hardware techs decided the solution was to smack the drives so hard that the disks would be warped to unreadability or shattered before returning them under warranty. This worked, but since there were accelerometers in the drives and this violated the warranty, this was a bad idea and they were told to stop.
The solution decided upon was to run the drives through an industrial degausser. This was a device that used rapidly oscillating electromagnets to destroy magnetically stored data without damaging the media itself.
So, they bought this machine, took the disk drive out of a functioning laptop, ran it through, and put the drive back into the laptop.
It still booted. It literally destroyed not one byte of data.
I believe that the device did eventually work, but nevertheless, it just isn’t that easy these days. Hasn’t been for years.
Now, back in the days of floppy disks and tape drives, a kitchen magnet would do the job.
Latest Answers