Yeah, because destroying it and making your computer worth next to nothing makes so much more sense than just deleting the partition and re-creating it.
There are low level solutions / utilities that can read disk drives even after multiple over-write passes. It takes serious physical damage to subvert recovery.
You’re assuming the old drives have value.
New drives are very cheap. Your personal information is not.
In order to ensure there are no legacy bread crumbs of your data on a drive you need to Di-mil.
I use a product called “Eraser” and am constantly overwriting old files 7(DoD or Schnier. I mix em up) times and when it comes to give the thing to a needy person I take a dental pick to each bit and byte and then run Guttman(35 passes) over whatever is left.
I’ve tried to use various tools for recovery to ensure I zapped it clean and I haven’t been able to recover a thing after that.
I do the same thing on cell phones if I give one to a needy person.
I pull everything I want off, clean out any personal Ident’s, load it back up with a couple super large files, run a 7 pass to erase and finally a 35 pass on free storage.
If they can get anything off there then it’s theirs and they are better than me....never...
To be honest, I don’t replace my laptops until they are broken and unrepairable. Therefore, the hard drive (and all of my business and client data) is excess - because I ALWAYS back up the data!