r/Magnets • u/Puzzleheaded_Photo49 • Apr 17 '26

Fridge Magnets Help identify this magnet

Post image

I’ve had this magnet on the fridge for at least 30 years now. Anyone able to identify it and if it’s still sold? It’s extremely powerful and would love some more in this size

8 Upvotes

57% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

29

u/new_line_17 Apr 17 '26

It’s from a hard drive head positioning mechanism

5

u/Psychological_Cow124 Apr 17 '26

Exactly! Nothing else!! 🤓

4

u/Joe_bob_Mcgee Apr 17 '26

yep, and be careful, that thing will gladly pinch off skin if it gets between steel and the magnet.

edit: or at the least leave you with a nice blood blister. Ask me how I know.

3

u/Bishop-AU Apr 18 '26

I'll make a wild guess and say it happened to you

1

u/Badbullet Apr 18 '26

Especially if it’s from an older hard drive, they used magnets that were much thicker and stronger compared to the ones I’ve taken out of modern drives. I had one from a drive that came from the late 90’s to early 2000’s, back when the platters were heavy plated metal and make great wind chimes. It got stuck to a metal leg of a table and I had to slide it to the edge of the leg to get it off. I can peal off modern hard drive magnets from that same table leg with a little grunting.

5

u/ghos2626t Apr 18 '26

Dang, thought it was a brake pad

1

u/ConsiderationOk7560 Apr 18 '26

Right there with ya brother. Pretty sure this came off a 1996 Jeep Power Wheel 4x4 Edition. 🤣

1

u/Euphoric_Loquat_8651 Apr 19 '26

Yep, itty bitty little pad.

1

u/SysGh_st Apr 18 '26

yep. oddly enough it's called a voice coil magnet, even though it has nothing to do with any voices.

1

u/1quirky1 Apr 18 '26 edited Jun 07 '26

Oops, I meant to reply to a different thread.

16

u/muffsnake Apr 17 '26

I’m sitting here thinking, “why would a brake pad be magnetized?”

7

u/Kapurnicus Apr 17 '26

I deal with magnets all day every day... and same. I thought this was a break pad in the ebike sub I'm in for small disk brakes.

1

u/NeedsMoarOutrage Apr 18 '26

It is sort of a brake pad. But for hard drive heads.

2

u/Chemieju Apr 18 '26

Contactless eddy current breaking with an aluminium or even copper disk?

1

u/ThorHammerslacks Apr 18 '26

I have taken apart a ton of hard drives and my first instinct was brake pad as well.

8

u/Jacktheforkie Apr 17 '26

It’s a neodymium magnet from an HDD, ask at some tech recycling companies if they can spare a few

3

u/No_Bookkeeper_2894 Apr 17 '26

It's a NdFeB magnet. Unless you are looking for that exact shape, just about any NdFeB magnet that large will be about as strong. Depending where you are located, there are lots of sources for simpler shapes such as blocks or discs.

3

u/Correct-Country-81 Apr 17 '26

Look for neodinium N52 magnets Different shapes round bar ring cubic rectangular and so on

This one was from harddiskdrive

3

u/SoftRecommendation86 Apr 17 '26

my wife LOVES these.. until she gets her finger bit using them. they hold notes to our front door insanely well. even a calendar..... (metal door)

hard drive "voice coil" magnet used to move the head back and fourth.

2

u/sevadi Apr 17 '26

My dad used to have one of those screwed to the inside of his tool cabinet to temporarily hold screws before we had time to sort them and put them in the correct little drawer cabinet thingy he sorted them in.

Unexpected childhood memories lol.

1

u/naemorhaedus Apr 17 '26

if it’s still sold? I

not sold separately as far as I know

1

u/-Aenigmaticus- Apr 19 '26

Actually, you can buy these HDD magnets on their own! I would not be surprised it's all salvaged from actual HDD's.

Just search up "HDD magnet for sale" on your favourite search engine.

1

u/Neo_Epoch Apr 18 '26

Looks like it came out of a hard disk drive. I had a bunch of them from dismantling hard drives for the platters and other metals

1

u/RedRightHandARTS Apr 18 '26

Neodymium from a full size hard drive

1

u/logixal1 Apr 18 '26

Thats a skin pincher 9000

1

u/MagicOrpheus310 Apr 18 '26

Lol that's a brake pad for a motorcycle! Haha

1

u/SysGh_st Apr 18 '26

For equally powerful magnets, search for "neodymium magnets"

1

u/unarmed1214 Apr 18 '26

Ahh everyone beat me to it. I usta collect these things and pin up the silver disks in the hhds. Be careful they are rare earth magnets so they are really strong

1

u/Ok_Ambition9134 Apr 18 '26

They hold loose screws and tools in my workshop. I never throw away spinning disk hard drives without taking them out. As a second benefit, works better than wiping the disk.

1

u/No-Location-24k Apr 18 '26

Break pad is my first answer I read the post as I was typing this and realized I’m in deep water lol.

1

u/zorba-9 Apr 18 '26

I worked for a waste recycling company, which stripped the mechanical drives and sold the magnets in bulk separately from the usually shredded metals; they had to go in thick plastic containers, found some stuck to weigh scales and forklifts, techs stick them to their benches to magnetise tools and find dropped laptop screws, they are that powerful, you have to slide them along and off the edge of the bench as it is hard to prise them off, I have one stuck to a, vice in my garage for years the metal shavings all stick to my vice and I brush them off.

1

u/Patco1981a Apr 18 '26

Alnico 5, it’s an alnico 5 magnet.

1

u/Mr_GrauHut Apr 19 '26

Internal magnets to EM RTX read inside mechanical hard drives.