Subwoofer + CPU tower = Recipe for disaster?
 

My loverly home entertainment center is powered, by and large, by a Power Mac G4 tower running a bunch of HDDs storing my movies, music, TV series, ROMs, etc.

For the 2006 holidays I got a surround speaker system which included, naturally, a subwoofer. The problem is, due to cable lengths and such, the only place I could fit the sub was on the floor to the right of the TV shelf...right next to the G4.

I remember hearing some years ago that it was unwise to have computer cases in close proximity to subwoofers or other powerful speakers due to them being magnetically unshielded. As I understand, hard drives have some pretty hefty magnetic shielding, but it makes me a bit nervous nonetheless.

Do I need to relocate either the tower or the sub before my files get Alzheimered into oblivion, or are the concerns of the past no longer concerns?

If it matters at all, I loathe the sound of heavy bass and as such keep the subwoofer at levels ranging from "modest" to "weak" to "crippled" to "Terri Schiavo."

Tank ya verra much.

Your computer is built into a metal case, is it not (concealed within a plastic shell of course)? In which case it should provide some level of shielding regardless of the lack of protection provided by the speaker itself. It's a common misconception that speaker magnets with a long range low density magnetic field can corrupt data on a hard disc. A hard disc uses very intense short range magnetivity to write data to the platter. This range is usually no more than a few millimetres. There is no way that a speaker magnet even centimetres away from a drive could damage the data directly.

Phew. That puts my mind at ease.

Of course, worrywart that I am...

Directly?

There's no chance your drives will be affected at all. I have had my sub about 4 inches from my tower for 3 or 4 years, and I've never had a problem with any of my drives. To make you feel even safer, I have set multiple hard drives down on top of the sub woofer, while both the drives and sub were all turned on. I have also run the computer without the left side panel on (the side the sub is on) for very long periods of time. Nothing bad has ever happened.

I said directly because I couldn't 100% guarantee you wouldn't suffer from data corruption via data being affected through the cabling that goes in and out of the drive (picking up external EM radiation), but this is very unlikely.

Awesome.

Thanks a million, fellas.

All I know is that my Logitech Z-5500's came with a warning that said "This subwoofer contains very powerful magnets and should be kept 2 feet away from electronics like computers, TVs, and CRT monitors." Maybe it's just a CYA maneuver on their part, but... I put that sucker on the OTHER side of the desk from my Mac Pro. I don't fuck around when it comes to my baby.

Hmmmm...

Well, considering that it is an older system (albeit one that has served me well, for which I am eternally thankful to it) and the only thing at risk are the drives (and my entire entertainment collection...fuck) which can be replaced relatively cheaply (but not that entertainment collection...fuckfuck), I'll chance it for now. If anything goes wrong, y'all will be hearing from me.

Thanks again for the help, everyone. Oh, and killmoms--I'm being mighty careful with my new G5. I still get squirmy when the fans spin up to full speed, completely forgetting every time that quad-cores use liquid cooling.

This may seem obvious, but if you've got a lot of important, hard to replace data, you should just back it up to DVDs or buy a few more drives to copy the data to. Storage is pretty cheap (though I wouldn't be able to afford buying a couple back-up drives right now), and spending money on more drives is better than losing your data somehow (which is, in my experience, extremely unlikely).

Well, the data there would be pretty hard to replace, but none of it is persona work, resumés, portfolio stuff, etc. It's all music and movies. It would just take a long time to re-pirate the stuff. More drives couldn't hurt, though. 'Specially since my girlfriend scored a 500GB for about $180.

When I was younger there was this private LAN party in the basement of my friend. Someone placed his tower near the washing machine (It was more like that: there were both washing machine and drier, with some place between them - put a board on the two machines and you get a primitive table); everything (except our course our computer hardware) was unplugged.

Then there was some 48h-gaming and we all decided to get some sleep upstairs. Some hours later: Return to the basement, our equipment was unplugged (not that tragic), the drier and the washing machine was plugged in instead, but they were off - so we decides to replug our computers and continue gaming. Haha, the guy with the tower near the washing machine didn't even get to the bootmanager.

What did happen? My friends mum decides that she had to do the laundry, obviously without omitting the spin cyle.

Hardware damage: none (the low-level format did the job)
Data loss: nearly everything (we did recover some fragments, but not much)

Since then I'm always cautious when it comes to data integrity.

cya
liquid

I would imagine the vibrations produced by the speaker are both of a shorter wavelength and less powerful than those produced by the washing machine, right?

Hopefully so...

Funny story, though.

It's not about soundwaves produced by the system, but the electromagnetic field. Spin cycle creates some very 'nice' EM-fields, maybe because of the motor size.

Could a subwoofer possibly pose the same threat to a hard drive that it could to DVD discs?

Subs can't damage DVDs.

The data on DVDs is stored and read optically instead of magnetically, and thus unaffected by magnetic fields.

That's not really true. DVDs have conductive components so a dynamic magnetic-field can induce a current in these conductors - if the current is strong enough the conductor and its surroundings are damaged because of the resistance of the conductor (leading to heat dissipation).
BUT you would need some very hefty fields for that to happen.