In other words can they become de -magnatized. I had problems with digital point and shoot and now know why they tell you to take the batteries out when you are storing the camera. no. there is nothing magnetic about CD writing. this is done with an optic device (Laser). A laser is used for both reading the CD and writing to a CD No. The only risk of damage to your CD's would be from heat generated by the drive. CD's aren't magnetic. They use an optical property called interference to store data. So putting your CD's next to a magnetic device shouldn't have any effect at all. Nope. CDs don't use magnetic fields to store information. Floppy disks and various tape media do, but even then i wouldn't worry too much about leaving them next to an external hard drive because the magnetic fields on the hard drive are so localized, i highly doubt they could damage nearby magnetic media. (Two floppy disks right on top of one another won't corrupt each other's data) | 