You jest, but jackass security people would probably be dissatisfied that your PII might be accessible to some alien race when after the earth explodes in 5 billion years and some remanent of data is somehow recoverable from an asteroid made of cooled lava.

I recall one datacenter consolidation project where the hard drives from decommissioned servers were zapped with a degaussing device, shredded, and then somebody signed off that they were dumped in a furnace somewhere. (At some ridiculous expense)

Meanwhile, the normal operation bins of drives that were in little blue bins for collection where just picked up and moved by the moving men, and are probably still in some closet in the new facility!

I failed an audit once because the inspection team managed to recover data from the information encoded on the event horizon of a nearby black hole.

Can't be too careful nowadays.

Another good worker screwed by the holographic principle.

Edit: wow... that joke went badly.

There's a great defcon talk exploring different methods to completely destroy a drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y.

He forgot to mention he has purchased a steel foundry for the triennial purpose of zeroed-out drive disposal.

Or nuke the entire site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure.

In India we use elephants for 100% certainty.

Not a good idea. Elephants never forget.

Don't forget to check that the volcano is active!