Stir plate with laptop hard drive

[smokey810]

I have an old (mid 90s) laptop gathering dust. I'm sure the fan is too small for a stir plate but does anyone know if the magnet is useful? Not sure if those differ from the desktop kind.

 

[Homercidal]

There are a couple of different styles. It might work fine, but then it might be hard to mount and maybe not powerful enough to do a good job on a thick slurry.

Just an FYI, but you can order rare earth magnets on ebay for a couple of bucks. They are symmetrical and generally easier to work with than a hard drive magnet.

 

[F-Bomb]

I tried this a couple of weeks ago with an old laptop (early 2000's?) I had kicking around in my basement. I did run into a few problems. The rare earth magnets are much smaller (roughly 50%) than the magnets out of a desktop hard drive. Also the only fan that my laptop had in it was a video card fan that pretty much had the job of cooling the entire computer. The fan was too small and the magnets were not powerful enough to generate enough pull to stir.

I ended up scrapping it and using desktop components.