No, this is completely impossible and noone has ever done it. (An exception would be HDDs with bad block mapping because they might not actually erase some sector.)
SSDs don't even have platters and you could probably recover things from the flash, but you can avoid this with disk encryption by simply losing the keys.
> Really safe deleters will overwrite the segments of memory multiple times to scramble magnetic signatures
Deletion programs do this because it looks cool. It's not necessary - literally noone has ever recovered anything from a zeroed out HD sector.
Pedantic devil's advocate - nobody has claimed to do it. When dealing with international espionage and possibly the DoD or DHS examining the drive, I wouldn't bet on that assumption.
I believe the government outsources to the same data recovery firms as everyone else; they can get things off drives with dead electronics or platters that haven't actually been erased, but that's it.
anything of value
From what I recall, with an electron microscope you can detect polarity around the edges of bits for certain magnetic storage devices and I recall seeing a paper where this was stepped through a several bits were recovered with fairly good success rates. This is part of the reason behind the old rationale of overwriting multiple passes.
With that said, given current data density for anything useful, reassembling anything remotely useful from such an approach would be nearly impossible and take a huge amount of time.
With NAND based storage, none of this applies or at least has entirely different context to consider.
Edit, was curious, here's a reference you could follow to the actual paper for empirical backup: https://www.sans.org/blog/overwriting-hard-drive-data/
You can’t transplant a platter into another reader, the old days of Guttman method don’t really apply anymore, density is so high that outside of research settings it’s just not practical.
That said I still put a drill through mine before disposing of them, because close to zero isn’t zero.
HDD recovery research is almost certainly a well-funded area of intelligence services, so I imagine their are a few electron microscopes and STMs which can do it.
There's certainly no military data destruction guide which doesn't start with "shred the platter to this grain size".
Then why do I get tons of results on YouTube of people doing exactly that, when searching for “HDD transplant”?
https://drivesaversdatarecovery.com/data-recovery-services/d...
It's really unclear to me whether or not HDs are recoverable from the comments I'm seeing, and honestly I don't care that much so I'm going to stop commenting.
...only if the platters are glass. Many (most?) are made of metal.
>It's really unclear to me whether or not HDs are recoverable from the comments I'm seeing, and honestly I don't care that much so I'm going to stop commenting.
The same video also mentions him being able to salvage a hard drive that was in a multi-vehicle accident, because the platters haven't been shattered.
I was thinking of this from the forensics standpoint initially of erasing data from an HD (however many comments up it was about hiding data). I don't really care about the particulars of the method. If there's an easy way to store data and secure it, it sounds like it's impossible for that data to be recovered.
https://www.ontrack.com/en-us/data-recovery/hard-drive
https://www.gillware.com/hard-drive-data-recovery/scratched-...
Note: I do overwrite the drives (DBAN) then drill them and these are going to recycling anyway - it's quantifying the risk - I drill the drives because they usually have had customer or client data on them at some point so it's just good practice.
You remove the cover, unscrew the platter, use sticky tape on the sides of the platters to remove them and place them in the donor drive...
With an identical drive you don’t even need to worry about anything else the data will be there as nothing has happened.
The “new” drive just worked it still does...
Unless the plates are completely shattered you can recover the data.
And I can guarantee you that the FBI has a data recovery lab that is much better than what I can do at home.