transporting drivers (magnets vs hard drives)

i generally commute on my bike to my studio / workshop, usually bringing my laptop + couple portable hard drives in my backpack. whenever i have to transport drivers from home to studio im afraid of getting these magnets to close to hard drives so i end up using another bag.. . am i being paranoid? most of the speakers im working with dont have huge magnets (4"ers) but curious if anyone has a story to tell 🙉
 
whenever i have to transport drivers from home to studio im afraid of getting these magnets to close to hard drives so i end up using another bag.. . am i being paranoid?

Perhaps not, the speakers could affect the drive.

But if your 'puter is a newere laptop it likely has an SSD which won’t care.

dave
 
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I would try to keep them apart.
I once laid a speaker on top of an old TV.
When I came back to the TV and turned it on it had all sorts of strange colours near where the speaker was.
I had to remove the speaker, turn TV off, wait a while, then turn it on again to degauss the screen.
The shadow mask warps on a CRT when you get a stray magnetic field close to it. Thats why it shifts the colors around. All CRT based TVs have a degaussing coil built in which energizes every time you turn it on from a cold start. Sometimes its not sufficient to get rid of the discoloration and a separate stronger degaussing coil is needed to remove the shadow mask deflection. You can do permanent damage if you leave the magnet close to the CRT for a longer time. Thank goodness we now have led flat screens. I hated the constant 15k whine from the flyback transformer. Drove me nuts as a younger guy when my hearing was better.
 
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From time to time, when lacking space, I put my laptop on top of my speaker. Distance between speaker magnet and HDD is around 30cm/1ft, maybe a bit less. Never had any problems, but I wouldnt recommend this.
In one occasion I put a cheap quartz-motor watch on my speaker and it stopped ticking. And my sister put one of my audio casettes on the speaker and after that I noticed high frequencies were attenuated.
 
Magnetic field near a speaker magnet can be and is VERY strong, but intensity lowers following the square of the distance, so 30 cm or more "should" be reasonably safe, under no circunstances should reach 10 cm or less.

Damage is instantaneous, does not "take time" to happen, so even a quick swipe too near can be harmful.

As a side note: why commute carrying small Studio Monitors in a backpack?

They can´t be that expensive, having 1 set at each sithe should be doable.

My point being that the possible Music loss will be way worse than the cost of a couple small speakers.
 
I had put an old laptop on a chair and covered it with a thin towel to protect it. Being the forgetful type, a few days later, and looking for a flat surface to put down a 15" bass driver I thought, "ah, nice flat surface out of the way" and put the driver on top, magnet down. After a couple of days, I moved the speaker, only to remember the Dell laptop underneath ... "POO the magnetic HD will be scrap!" Luckily all is well, don't ask me how or why! But I've checked, using a drawing package and accessing old files, lucky me 🙂 This was last week, the magnet diameter is about 210mm (8"). I do think that these old Dell's have a metal frame and display cover.
 
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Lucky you 🙂

That said, in a normal ferrite ring magnet assembly, magnetic flux is minimal, near zero, in the exact center, think along the polepiece axis; and strongest at the edges of the "sandwich"

To boot, at the center of the disk it has lots of iron to travel through so it will prefer to travel through it, while at the disk edge the path abruptly stops, so a lot of flux will jump outside, into the surrounding space.

Just try it with a screwdrver tip.

That said, I wouldn´t try it.
 
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