system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:When deleting data off hard drives to cover your tracks, why do we often see the drives physically destroyed?

I'm talking about in movies and TV shows, like Mr. Robot, when trying to delete evidence or something on a hard drive/usb drive, often simply deleting it isn't enough.
I am aware that simply 'deleting' something doesn't necessarily remove it, (it just sets that chunk of data as available to be written over) and forensic data recovery can find it, so I am asking more specifically how can you recover data that has been properly deleted. Like written over, formatted, and wiped clean. Is physically destroying the drives just to be 100000% sure or is there an actual chance that if found the data could be recovered?
gpt
Think of a hard drive like a notebook. Imagine writing important stuff on that notebook really hard. If you do a simple delete, you're just erasing the cover that says what's in it. Someone can still open it and read what you wrote. You can also overwrite it, which would be like tearing off that top sheet and writing over the dents in the notebook with other data. Even AFTER doing that, someone could still maybe figure out what was written before (just like rubbing it with the side of a pencil). It's messy and you might not be able to make it all out, but maybe enough to be dangerous. Clearly, the more times you repeat writing over that page, the harder that is. Plus it takes forever to cover every inch of that paper.

Your solution then? Light the damn thing on fire. Or crush it, break it, physically damage it (it should be noted that just like taping a shredded notebook back together, it is possible to retrieve data from broken drives in some cases, but it's very time consuming, very difficult and because data is written in bits spread all over the drive and not in neat rows as in a notebook, even harder still.