my only concern is destroying a work laptop just by grabbing it with the wrong hand.
There will be other folks on here who be a lot more knowledgable about this than me, however I know a bit about hard-drives and I honestly doubt that small magnet will be powerful enough at that distance (through the chasis of the laptop, plastic, metal casings) to do any damage to your data.
Do yourself a favour though for multiple reasons and consider converting your laptop hard drive to a solid state one, not only are they cheap now but they are also a lot faster. Faster read/write Disk I/O will give your laptop a noticable speed improvement in loading everything to be honest. Making that move will also mean you don’t have to have any fears about accidentally erasing or loosing your data due to your hand! 
Win, win.
it does put alot of purpose into backing up files but lets imagine a very real scenario for myself. i have network attached storage in raid configurations. with 10 tb drives costing way more in ssd form im just curious if anyone that has one could test this theory real world techy scenario. take an old drive with an old OS and grab it for science. this could easily be a feature if it works. like a magic touch you can assume the name casper.
I could not imagine any scenario that the xG3 would do anything to any hard drive.
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You should be doing that anyway in this day and age.
My initial recommendation of SSD was based on your previous comment where you said:
So you’ve changed the ball-park by changing the scenario.
Likewise a small implanted magnet will not damage your big NAS. Anyone else please feel free to butt in and correct me if I’m wrong.
I apologize I added additional interactions with hard drives to the possibilities of my concerns. Here are some additional realistic scenarios i can imagine. Simply being handed someone else’s laptop to carry, swapping hard drives on a Nas, opening computer cases for diagnosis, and being handed generic looking external usb hard drive that are now the normal size and shape of a usb power pack are all scenarios I’d like to avoid accidental data loss. There are other possible scenarios where having the ability to erase a hard drive with the swipe of my hand would easily be a feature. Anytime i want to erase a hard drive without formatting it. Hillary could have really used a magnetic implant for instance provided it had the capability.
So my ask to the community is if there is anyone that has an old laptop or external drive lying around that can test the possibilities for science and post the results here?
Did you not watch the video I posted where he put a huge magnet on the hard drive itself and it did nothing to the data? The xG3 is a tiny fraction of the power of that magnet and there’s a layer of glass and skin between it and anything you could possibly put it near. You’re safe.
Just search youtube and you’ll get plenty of people that have already tested to see what it takes to erase a hard drive. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=magnetic+erase+hard+drive
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Totally watched the video just looking for anyone with first hand experience (pun intended)
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IMO, if you are concerned about these issues, it may just be in your best interest to not get it implated. However, based on how weak, relatively speaking, these magnets are, you should have no issue at all handling things. The magnets are too weak to even whip a credit card magnetic strip when in direct contact, so an assembled hard drive should be just fine, and even a fully disassembled on as well, though i cant think of a reason you would just have a good hard drive opened up anyway.
If you want to get an xG3, I say go for it.
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