Can magnets used in boxes affect CD/DVD discs?

I've had a paranoid fear that any magnet would wreck a CD/DVD.

A while back, I got a bunch of Puela Magi Madoka Magica rings and necklaces, the boxes they came in open up like a book. It has a flap down one side which suck back to the box, I know that where the flap sticks to is a magnet as the metal chain on the necklace will sometimes stick to the side of the box when I put it back in.

Currently I have all the necklaces and ring in their boxes far away from any of my games or manga, but I do need to store some in storage.

So can these magnets actually wreck CD/DVD disks or should I just be worried about my hard drives?

3 Answers

While that fact is true with floppy discs, CDs and DVDs do not suffer the same problems. When CDs and DVDs are written, they are written permanently and then sealed with a layer of plastic.

This structure of the discs stop them from becoming warped. Extreme heat and cold on the other hand will warp the plastic and cause the disc to become unreadable.

no normal magnet can damage a CD/DVD. If you have a magnet powerful enough to lift 100lbs there could be a tiny chance. Now a floppy disk is magnetic and could get damaged. The CD/DVD is physically burned into the surface of the disc in a non-magnet way. However CD/DVD still contain metal so if you had a ridiculously strong magnet there is a minute chance of damaging it.

Magnets will not affect a CD or DVD. In comercial pressed CD and DVD they have made pits in an aluminum layer that is simply, non magnetic.

The home versions of CDs have an alloy layer that bends at the heat of the focused light beam during recording and thus mimic pits and land that would be on the commercial pressed disk surface. Again, non magnetic.