Can a Magnet Zap a Hard Drive as Depicted on Breaking Bad?

Last night's season five premiere of Breaking Bad not only continued the adventures of milquetoast high school chemistry teacher turned drug lord, but also showcased a questionable feat of technology—using a super magnet from afar to erase the contents of a notebook's hard drive.

Quick recap in case you missed the show. A laptop, possibly storing video of the two main characters manufacturing meth in a secret lab, is seized by the police. The former science teacher, Walter White, and his sidekick, Jesse Pinkman, are desperate to destroy any incriminating evidence on the laptop's hard drive.

The duo rig a truck with a large magnet from a junkyard crane winch, normally used to pick-up and move vehicles. They connect the magnet to a number of batteries. The truck is then driven to and parked alongside the police station evidence locker. With the magnet powered on, all metal objects in the vault fly through the air pulled by electromagnetic force, including the laptop, and end up stuck to the wall inside the evidence room. The scene ends with a shot of the laptop's screen shattered, and our heroes drive away into the night, satisfied that the data on the laptop is gone.

A look at the making of the episode on AMC's website shows that the magnet attached to the crane in one scene is a real magnet in a real-life salvage yard. The magnet actually picks up a small car as depicted on the episode. Set designers had to outfit the car with two 1,500-pound metal plates to create enough mass for the magnet to pick up the vehicle. However, the scene where the laptop flies out of Jesse's hands when he and Walt are testing their solution was done using cables.

The Plausibility
This all made for great TV but it also lends to musing. Could you rig up a huge magnet to multiple batteries and position it next to a place where a laptop is being stored to wipe out that laptop's data?

Walter and Jesse, essentially, created a make-shift degausser. Degaussers are devices that produce strong enough magnetic fields that can demagnetize hard drives, thereby erasing data on the disks.

Hard drive degaussers concentrate a strong magnetic field and confine it to a hard drive-sized area. They work off ordinary 115 volt current, or utilize strong permanent magnets. Many of us remember how it was possible to use a magnet to wipe out floppy disk drives. However, even older IDE and now SATA drives are a bit trickier to wipe out with magnets. Over the years, degausser magnetic strength has had to increase to ensure they can erase the most difficult hard drives.

I asked some experts in the field of storage, degaussing, and even our own PCMag lab analysts who review laptops and storage components on a daily basis for their insight.

Renee Schafer, director of sales and marketing for Data Security, Inc., a company that specializes in data security and degaussing, said there was no way to assure the Breaking Bad method of hard drive erasure would work.

"Because the material in hard drives, such as the one in the laptop, is designed to store information, hard drives require extreme magnetic strength to degauss or erase. Scrap steel, such as vehicles, is very easy to magnetize and attract, even though the magnetic pickup may need a large crane and energy source such as many car batteries. The strength of the junkyard magnet's field is unknown, and passage through the thickness of a wall will significantly reduce its magnetic strength. Vaults are usually made of magnetic metal, which will have a shielding effect, at least partly blocking the magnetic strength reaching the laptop. Regardless if this wall had metal in it, there was still a wall, separating the laptop from the magnet," Schafer said.

Linda M. Schiro, vice president of sales for VS Security Products Ltd., a leading degausser manufacturer, watched yesterday's Breaking Bad episode and spoke with company engineers about the effort.

"We have determined that what was shown on the TV show, Breaking Bad was an exaggeration of deleting data from a laptop," she said. "The concept of strong magnetic fields of erasing data however is a truism, perhaps the TV show just over-simplified what Degaussing is designed to do. Degaussing (or bulk erasing as it is sometimes called) means putting the hard drive on a Magnetic platform that effectively scrambles all the bits of information at the microscopic level and in about 5 seconds the drive has no readable data left. What we provide to our customers are Degaussers that will erase to NSA standards."

Good "Science Fiction"
I also posed the Breaking Bad scenario to Todd Schuelke, product reviews manager at Iomega Corporation, maker of consumer and business NAS storage products, and Iomega's engineers.

"With today’s High Flux Densities in modern hard drives it would have to be one extremely powerful magnet and the magnetic field would have to be very focused to deal with today’s perpendicular writes to the HDD platters, and that extremely powerful magnetic field would cause problems just trying to get it to the hard drive you wanted to destroy the data on," Schuelke said. "Makes for good science fiction, just not sure how practical it would be, to get the power you’d need to wipe the data."

Some of us in PCMag labs are also skeptical. Joel Santo Domingo, lead analyst for desktops and laptops said that, "the realism of the situation is highly suspect." Brian Westover, an analyst for hardware, offered that the scene may be possible if "the goal is only to corrupt the data" on the drive.

Another unnamed source said the scenario was improbable as degaussing devices usually need to be right next to or on the hard drive to work. This source also cited the decreased probability of erasing a drive in such a manner because of shielding in current laptops and hard drives.

One fact is for sure, Walter White may be out of luck if that laptop, which was shown to be a Samsung, used solid states drives instead of SATA, as Matthew Murray, PCMag's lead analyst for components and DIY, pointed out. Solid state drives are not magnetic and degaussers can't erase them. Breaking Bad is all about science, and part of the fun is that the way science is applied seems to be in the realm of possibility. While there seems to be no definitive "yes," and a more probable "no" as to whether Walt's rigged degausser would zap the drive that could finally get him in big legal trouble, the scene's plausibility does not seem terribly far-fetched. Perhaps the fact that the probability that the drive was not erased, is an important plot for the show's final season.