I am seeing if I can fry digital circuits with a neutron beam. I'm pretty certain that one could cook electronics from a great distance away, through walls even, with gamma radiation. However, I can't get it to work - probably because I don't have access to that energetic of materials . . . which is maybe a good thing!
Not much was getting through the drive, no surprise. I left it like that overnight and then hooked the drive back up to a computer and tested it. Just fine. I don't really have any rad sources with the kind of power to really test this, but I am pretty sure my back of a napkin calculations on this are right and it could work.