Laptops magnets and hard drivez
 

My phone case is handmade leather wallet style that has two strong magnets that keep it closed.

When I'm on the couch with my laptop I occasionally place the phone on the laptop right in the area of the hard drive.

I use Hitachi drives in my laptops and have never had one fail until 2 months ago when a 16 month old drive started clicking.

Hmm, odd but there's a first for everything so I order a new one and pop it in.

Sitting here tonight and check something on the phone, place the phone on the laptop and almost immediately the HD starts sounding like a rod knock.

Fark me.

Apparently the magnets are just strong enough to bend the arms for the heads.

Lesson learned.

Yea, change to a SSD.

I would say the arms did not bend but that the magnets in the phone case fried a small part of the hard drive circuits and the BIOS is not able to make the drive work as it should. Back in my motorcycle days I used to epoxy strips of neodymium to the underside of both frame rails so that the signal light sensors would easily trip when I would pull up to the light. Otherwise most times the bike could not cause a signal change but with the magnets it would mess with the light timer and switch nearly immediately.

But why don't the magnets mess up the iPhone?

An iPhone is well shielded and has no spinning hard drive. (actually most phones are well shielded)

The shielding is why you can have the phone and car remote key fob in the same pocket. Here is a neat trick to try but you need an old dial type phone and an old CRT type computer monitor. Fire the old monitor up, plug in the phone and sit it on top of the monitor and watch what happens to the computer screen. No shielding from the magnet in the bottom of the phone.