Using the smallest object available for engineering data storage devices - single atoms - the same team of IBM researchers who made this movie also recently created the world's smallest magneticbit.
More baffling, at least to physicists, is that sometimes a bit of the plasma manages to break through the magnetic barrier and get inside the magnetosphere.
While the swifter SATA drives will likely benchmark a bit better than the PATA counterparts, both versions sport perpendicular magnetic recording to prevent data corruption, as well as "industry leading free-fall sensors" that pack 700G of operating shock tolerance.
Since Indian ATMs don't require the double identification of RFID smart card and magnetic strip, just the strip, they were able to manage quite a bit of cash before a vigilant security guard spotted them making withdrawls from multiple cards in succession.
There seems to be no way that particles streaming past the earth along magnetic field lines can make a turn, move at right angles to those lines for a bit and end up inside the magnetosphere.