Renting physical hard drives does seem pretty dumb, though.

The hard drives had been used for data sharing servers at the prefectural government office and were replaced with new ones in the spring.

The prefectural government had deleted the data, but the successful bidder of the hard drives was able to restore them by using special software. The government is trying to locate the remaining nine hard drives, which were also sold online in July to August.

The data servers had been leased from Fujitsu Leasing Co., which commissioned Broadlink Co. to scrap the replaced hard drives.

Zero-filling, one-filling, and random-filling all the bits of a hard drive is sufficient to make previous data effectively unretrievable. That doesn’t sound like what happened here.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13674/is-it-pos...

I would bet a lot of money they dragged the files to the "recycle bin" then maybe emptied it

If they were external drives it's likely they were on FAT32 which makes it even easier

It's a way to shift inventory management to the supplier, the alternative would be to employ people to try to sell used 1U servers & components.

Those companies will then pick up your used server, wipe it, and sell it to someone else. Depending on the contract that'll include physically intact hard drives.