The things that are not clear to me are:

- Why was the disk being replaced (SMART warnings? HW upgrade? It failed in some way)

- Why was the quick format recoverable? Was TRIM issued or the HW didn't support it?

- As a follow up, I'm guessing the HW didn't support HW encryption?

- Why are they relying on 3rd parties for the destruction of data?

Meanwhile, it seems that HDs don't leave Google datacenters in one piece