Unless the platters are physically shattered in a few thousand pieces, it is possible to reconstruct at least some data from them.
Also consider if they’re SSDs. SSDs can easily be destroyed with a magnet or a hammer. Destroy flash chips and the data is unrecoverable. Unless a platter is physically shattered, data can still be recovered. It’s all about the magnet integrity of the disk. I’ve seen data pulled from HDDs that were physically crushed but the platters were still intact.
SSD = solid state drive? If so, flash memory is pretty well immune to normal magnets. Even smashing it with the hammer is more likely to break the circuit board or break the leads off the chips, both of which are possible to recover from if you have the time and money to remove the die from the packaging. Even if you break the chip you might not break the die apart.
The screwdriver and hammer comment might be something as simple as removing the HD from the computer, opening up the drive to access the platters and then smashing those. That's how I usually destroy hard drives when I recycle a computer.