Can Magnets Scramble Computers? | I Didn't Know That

magnets a lot of fun but pretty harmless or are they could it be possible for this small bar of metal to wipe the memory off this laptop destroying my life's work the theory is that if you leave your laptop near a sufficiently big magnet it will erase or scramble everything on its hard drive to understand how this could happen we need to go back to basics hard drive store information magnetically you can see how this magnet can change the direction of these iron filings while a hard drive works in a similar way the disk is coated with a magnetically sensitive material that can be re orientated by this read/write head to form numerous patterns that the Machine interprets as information this information can be added to or deleted in the form of programs text and images so if it's susceptible to an internal magnetic source surely it should be affected by an external one but just how powerful does the magnet have to be this is a kid's toy it's too small elliptical magnets that rattle together noisy but not very powerful the question is would they bother our machine the effect if there's the B 1 will be instantaneous that doesn't seem to be doing anything this is roughly where the hard drive is so no this obviously isn't working we're gonna have to up the ante and use a bigger magnet this is a Gauss meter which measures magnetic force it shows that this big magnet is over three times more powerful than the toys it can pick up several hundred paperclips without a sweat so let's give it a go all right no now I'm slightly relieved my date is still intact but in the interest of science I'm gonna give the magnet a bit of a boost by wrapping a coil of wire around the magnet and passing a current through it you create a more powerful electromagnet in this case around 30% stronger than before but our little computer didn't even blink it was time to get really serious this company builds massive electromagnets the type used to pick up cars in scrap yards surprisingly it's only twice as powerful as our small homemade job but can apply that force over a much larger area after 22 seconds of raw electromagnetic force and it survived I powered it up and nothing was it really dead we had to be sure so we had it checked out by a computer data retrieval company this one is dead by scrambling every particle on the surface of the disk the big magnet had instantly wiped out every operating program and every file stored on the computer there was literally no information left for it to read but it had taken some fairly extreme measures to achieve it so it seems our magnetic data is safe from everyday life just be sure to avoid any giant electromagnets

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 1,252,736

Keywords: National Geographic, I Didn't Know That, jonny phillips, richard ambrose, science, cool, quicksand, sand, sink, sinking, tide, slow, survive, escape, video, nature, experiment, study, national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, explore, discover, survival, documentary

Id: U8LWTe5CqQg

Length: 3min 44sec (224 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2013