lol. I wonder what would happen if i took my destop!  

My laptop,ipod, cellphone,etc has gone thru Airport security many times * I travel often for work* It has never affected any of them.

Or the TSA could stop being asinine and act like every other developed nation's security checkpoints and LET YOU KEEP THE DAMNED THING IN THE BAG REGARDLESS.

Spoken like a true pirate.   AAARRGGHHHH! 

I bet they dropped it,  Hard... with their foot.  Or something.  Physics, I suggest you study it.

I've dropped hard drives and never damaged them that badly.  Something other than human negligence was afoot.

I'm not inclined to repeat the experiment, but if you believe you can remove the human error (i.e. dropping) from the equation, please feel free to inform us of your results.

And just so we're on the same page here-this was a hard drive itself, not a hard drive in a laptop.

It could have been the metal detector, those have been known to produce strong magnetic fields, usually not passing through it, but near the machine.  Still, itd have to be pretty strong.  Another option could be the motors in the conveyor belts.  Just not the xray machine.

Yeah, I wouldn't be repeating the experiment.

Close enough, if it has to pass by it.

Bottom line: Don't put it in checked, carry it on.

The metal detector does not equal the xray machine, and with normal operation (ie passing through the machine not beside it) it wont harm the drives.  Check this out HD-3 if you wanta know what it takes to fully erase a hdd with a magnetic field.  Always safer to carry on your laptop though, no one is gonna take as much care of it as you will.

There's no issue with electronics and airport X-ray machines.  It's an old wives tale/urban legend.

BUT always carry the expensive stuff with you in your carry on.  There are a LOT of baggage handlers all over the world who steal stuff out of your luggage.  I've seen it MANY times now.

I've seen them chuck computer bags twenty feet out of the cargo hold.  Dropping a hard drive and avoiding breaking it isn't terribly hard, when it's thrown, you're fucked, even in the case.  Even the magnetics that it might have been exposed to at worst could only erase your drive.

Airports are computer safe, baggage handlers, not so much.

Perfectly safe. Been on numerous flights with laptop bag, hard drives in the lapy bag and in my suitcase that went under the belly. Not one problem. Only annoying thing is when you randomly get picked for explosive detection and when they swipe your laptop it says "EXPLOSIVES DETECTED" so they have to do it again and again till it comes up clean I work for defence so I guess traces of gunpowder get in there from me fingers

Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure they do.