Hard Drive Magnets. The magnets used in hard disk drives are very strong neodymium (rare earth) magnets. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon.
They can be useful for holding things together and are fun to fiddle with. Unless this was a really coincidental thing where the HDD just happened to fail at the same time. How big does the magnet need to be?
Yet the data on the platters remain unaffected.
A hard drive has three major components, including a magnetic platter that stores data on the hard drive.
Theoretically it's possible because data is stored. By compromising the magnetic platter with a strong magnet. How big does the magnet need to be?