And yet for that to matter you need to ensure they actually are wrecked. I have no doubt you are able to destroy drives well enough for it to be impossible to get data out. That is not the point.
The point was that a lot of the damage that people think is sufficient to render a drive inoperable isn't. Most drives I've seen that people think they've destroyed does not have destroyed drive heads or shattered plates; most of them have not even been opened.
Maybe you do a proper job at it. But most people don't even know how to do the prerequisite damage.
But when you suggested that just opening the drive is enough, you were wrong.
If I can get data out of a drive that has been opened without any equipment or experience with data recovery, then that's a pretty low bar. Maybe I got lucky, but other people might get lucky too. It's a pointless risk.
Maybe destroying the heads is sufficient - I haven't tried recovering from that, so I don't know, and so I won't claim to know. Unlike when you assumed opening a drive is enough, even though it isn't. But given your assumptions on that are wrong, I don't trust your assumptions about damaging the heads either.
> And we're back to trust
Trust in things that can be verified more easily by less specialized staff matters. Hence why the more thorough physical destruction the better.
> And when we're talking about compromised drive firmware that is smart enough to use one method of exfiltration that neatly suits your argument but not another that doesn't, I think we're not really arguing about anything useful any more.
The one method only requires the drive to return false results that sufficiently convincingly suggests to someone verifying the destruction that the drive is clean. It just requires a pre-prepared firmware update to be downloaded to the drive, pretending to wipe the drive, and walking out with them.
The other is complex and error prone and requires an ongoing communications channel to the outside.
That you even suggest the two are equivalent in complexity is ludicrous.
Heads are entirely ruined very easily, to the point where I'm not convinced you could insert the platters into a new drive of the same model without wrecking those too.
> Assuming the person doing the destruction cared enough to pay attention.
And we're back to trust. No method works if you have no trust in it being carried out. Including destruction (see the post we're replying to.
Honestly I think, as with most data safety discussions, we're not talking about realistic threat vectors nor about common avenues of attack.
And when we're talking about compromised drive firmware that is smart enough to use one method of exfiltration that neatly suits your argument but not another that doesn't, I think we're not really arguing about anything useful any more.