Hi, I was recently reorganizing my desk, and I placed an electric pencil sharpener right next to an external hard drive. I’ve seen it do weird things when placed next to a CRT monitor once you start sharpening (something to do with electromagnetic radiation, I’m no expert on this stuff), so I was wondering if it could possibly damage the hard drive.
Anyone know for sure if it can or not? Thanks.
There are magnets in the electric motor in the sharpener. There are electromagnets and just normal ones in it, so I guess it could theoretically. It’s probably fine, though.
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any source of magnetic energy messes up the colors on CRT’s
my old alarm clock messes up the picture on my CRT screen
CRT’s even have built in circuitry that magnetizes them, it’s called degauss, works wonders if you want to rotate your CRT on the side
Hahaha
Hard drives work by magnetically storing information… So if you get a massive pencil sharpener that works off massive magnets you would probably get problems
But that would be quite ridiculous 
Thanks for the responses guys. I asked my grandfather who I consider to be a really smart guy and he said that the most it could potentially cause is data loss, but the hard drive should be undamaged.
I’m going to play it safe and move the sharpener over across from the monitor. Hopefully around 1.5 feet of distance between the hard drive and the sharpener is enough to prevent damage/data corruption from occurring, if it could even happen in the first place.
Look at it this way. When you turn a monitor on its side the reason it changes colors is due to the magnetic field of the earth. (Field strength of about one gauss) If you notice that your sharpener can cause funny colors but not nearly as much as those created just by rotating the monitor. So there for just having the hard drive on the surface of the earth has more impact than that of your sharpener. But if it costs you nothing I’m sure that extra 1.5 feet cant hurt
Gauss?
They degaussed the USS Eldridge, and it traveled through time or something.
Yeah, but I thought someone earlier mentioned degaussing and/or gaussing, and I read the same thing in your post while skimming.
De-gaussing is of course what they do to submarines and naval vessels to demagnetize the hulls, which they can be tracked by. The USS Eldridge was being degaussed, someone thought it was mad science, and then the urban legend of the Philadelphia experiment emerged.
Wait, so your saying… SCIENCE!!!
Ah FFS, it was just a picture of a plastic pencil sharpener anyway. Sod it. :meh:
Any magnetic force can damage a magnetic-based device, like you can damage a credit car by grabbing a iman in it black line.
I wish they had invented a suitable replacement to magnetic drives a long time ago but only now are solid state drives becoming relatively more affordable and accessible. Unfortunately, magnetic drives are still going to be around for at least a decade before SSD’s are cheap and reliable enough to completely replace them.
Unless the research and development of these things into consumer-ready devices takes a turn for the fast and affordable track in less than a decade.
Looks pretty harmless tbh
Add electric pencil sharpener to the thread title
SSD? Fuck SSD! Switch to SDHC!
if your laptop has a card reader just obtain a class 6 (or faster) SD card and put knoppix on it, it’s designed for live cd’s but it automatically recognizes that it’s on writable media so all changes you make can be saved (just type a file name on first boot time)
On my netbook I switched to an 8GB SDHC card and took out my mechanical hard drive, to save battery life, plus XP was getting too laggy (it was stuttering during youtube videos, of all things)
SDHC: Because we don’t need more than 10mb/s transfer speed. /irony
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