Be warned! Nightstar CS2 damaged my HDD

My Lacie 320GB and Seagate 1TB were both now unrecognized by my 2 desktops and 2 laptops (running Windows 7 and XP) after sitting in a drawer about 30-40cm away from the Nightstar CS2.

I know the magnet is strong but I didn't know it's that strong!

Now how do I fix my portable HDD? I could not format or do anything to them because Windows just did not detect the drives. Help please IT experts out there. :sick2:

Did you try taking the 1TB drive out and hooking it to the motherboard of one of the desktop computers?

Something else screwed up your drives. The rare-earth magnet in that flashlight (even if sitting directly on top of your drives) would simply not be powerful enough to affect the particles on the hard drive platter. The coercivity of the magnetic material on a modern hard drive platter is quite high. (Around two thousand Oersteds) The magnet in question would pretty much have to be almost in direct physical contact with the platter surface itself (within millimeters) to do any actual data corruption. The housing of the drive and the body of the flashlight physically impose enough spacing to prevent that from happening.

The drives in question were most likely dropped, inadvertently zapped with static, received a nasty power spike - or suffered from some other form of failure. If a strong magnet was responsible for corrupting data, you would still be able to recognize the drive and reformat it as while a strong magnetic field may have the potential to corrupt data, it wouldn't destroy the electronics nor render the media inoperable.

The thing is that happened to both of my drives which were recently used without problems. One of them is almost new and I am sure I did not drop them at all. Although I can't confirm the cause but it's likely the magnet. I'm still waiting for lacie support to answer. The drives are sealed and I don't want to cut them up yet. Any other ideas?

try a different USB cable perhaps

NickBose said:

I could not format or do anything to them because Windows just did not detect the drives. Help please IT experts out there. :sick2:

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If windows simply does not detect the USB device, then it's not the drive that's failed, but the controller in the external chassis.

They fail mostly due to power issues.

I think you've had a bad dose of co-incidence.

If you pull the drive from the chassis and fit it into a new one, odds are that everything will be just fine.

Damn. I feel so embarrassed. What an idiot I was. I changed the cables and voila they work!
So to close this thread: how dangerous the Nightstar shake lights really are to USB key, SD cards, and HDD?

NickBose said:

Damn. I feel so embarrassed. What an idiot I was. I changed the cables and voila they work!
So to close this thread: how dangerous the Nightstar shake lights really are to USB key, SD cards, and HDD?

Click to expand...

memory cards should be impervious to magnets. HDDs has to have a pretty strong field to upset them as was previously mentioned but I would just by general principle not put magnets anywhere near anything that is affected by magnetic fields even if the risk is slight. Hard drives themselves have very powerful magnets in them that are a lot stronger than all but rare earth magnets so most likely you would have to have a rare earth magnet on the case of the drive itself to have any chance.
I would not keep the shake light within a foot of your hard drives myself... things tend to migrate closer and if they were to touch it may be possible the magnet could zap a few bytes of data

Hard discs themselfes contain really strong magnets which are part of the head positioning system. If you have a broken hard disc, keep those magnets - they are fun to use.

Pöbel said:

Hard discs themselfes contain really strong magnets which are part of the head positioning system. If you have a broken hard disc, keep those magnets - they are fun to use.

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I have a hard disk magnet from an older hard drive less than a gigabyte and it is pretty strong.

Just be careful though; if you let the magnets slam into something they're attracted to they quickly start cracking and breaking.

Perhaps it's time to edit your title - Norm

NickBose said:

Damn. I feel so embarrassed. What an idiot I was. I changed the cables and voila they work!
So to close this thread: how dangerous the Nightstar shake lights really are to USB key, SD cards, and HDD?

Click to expand...