For practical purposes it would be enough to nick one side of the contacts of one of the IC's on the logic board. That renders the drive inoperable. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to solder in a new IC ? An electronics tech with the right tools might be able to do it.
If you wanted to take it up a notch you could remove the green board. You could put in a green board from a donor drive but it wouldn't work. Each board is specifically "tuned" to that particular hard drive at the factory.You could send the hard drive out to the manufacturer and have that board "tuned" but it generally costs between 1000.00 - 3500.00 per hard drive to have it done.
You can break the drive down. Once the platters are out of the drive it's unlikely that anyone could retrieve the info on them.They're not like a CD. There's no such thing as a universal platter reader.Good for anyone that could invent such a thing because you could make millions in doing legitimate data recovery on crashed hard drives.
Just an opinion, but i think they're overreacting out of fear.
On the other hand .... there's money to be made from CAPITALIZING on that fear by selling certified data destruction.
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