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Call the Mythbusters

Almost worth it, if only to see Adam do something stupid with a super-magnet. :¬)

One time I wasn't thinking and put a speaker magnet on top of a Mac Mini...
To my surprise, it didn't cause any data loss

The basic idea behind the "no magnets" thing is "better safe than sorry".

Ever since the (effectively unshielded) floppy disk is no longer widely used, I believe it is safe to say that all computer hardware is shielded well enough against casual / negligient magnet proximity. Hard drives, for example, require a quite strong magnetic field quite close to their surface to be affected. (Remember, the strength of an magnetic field degrades exponentially with distance.)

One thing, though:

ROM IC's, SSD disks etc. are not inherently "safe" from magnetic fields, even if they don't use magnetism themselves. A magnet (or an EMP pulse...) could induce enough current in an IC to fry the chip. But again, we're talking serious field strengths here.

All in all, it doesn't really matter what the exact physics behind this are. You don't keep magnets near your computer hardware, just as you don't put your tea cup on top of your laptop. Of course you can do it (and I have done both in the past...), but Murphy is an a**hole.

Solar wrote:(Remember, the strength of an magnetic field degrades exponentially with distance.)

Isn't it a quadratic (or at least polynomial) decay with distance, not an exponential one? The two are pretty different.

It's been a while but I think the magnetic field strength of a theoretical point magnet would drop of with the inverse square of the distance. But the magnetic field of a real actual dipole magnet drops off proportionally with the inverse cube of the distance.

Coty wrote:A few years from now I expect all computers to not be effected by Magnets

I hope for you that MRAMs will prove to be a dead-end, then

(Some sad news if it happens, that would have been a great way to make use of all these years of research in spintronics)

How about Magnets + Human (ie. the computer user)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromag ... and_safety

Some myth say expose the powerful magnetic fields can lead to cancers.