External hard drives and speakers

Thread view:

Enable EMail Alerts

Start New Thread

Thread rating:

wightstraker - 10 Apr 2007 00:23 GMT

I've just bought an external hard hard drive for 12" Powerbook. It
sits happily on my desk, and seems to be working fine, but I have one
concern - how much of a risk is to leave it by my speakers? At the
moment it's sitting about 2-3 inches in front of my right speaker.
I've heard that this could cause damage to the drive, but frankly, I
have little other place to put it and I'm feeling skeptical. Any real
world advice?

Reply to this Message

Clever Monkey - 11 Apr 2007 18:03 GMT

> I've just bought an external hard hard drive for 12" Powerbook. It
> sits happily on my desk, and seems to be working fine, but I have one
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> have little other place to put it and I'm feeling skeptical. Any real
> world advice?

The speaker will create a magnetic field that could affect magnetic
media. The force of a magnetic field drops off sharply with distance,
however, and a smallish paper or mylar cone speaker doesn't make much of
a field to start with. The field has fairly regular lobes extending
into space in many directions around the source.

You are /probably/ ok, but there are too many variables that could come
into play, so no one can say for sure. If you have a particularly
strong speaker that has fields that radiate just right out the front it
might actually cause the sorts of flaky behaviour that you don't want in
an external backup drive.

Reply to this Message

Mac Forum / General / Hardware / April 2007

External hard drives and speakers