Idiot!
You disassemble the drive, remove the platters and grind the magnetic oxide off.
Then you smash the circuit board with a small sledge hammer and burn it...then bury in a distant place.
Both the platters and the chips on the board can retain data.
You cannot trust the integrated circuits on devices anymore...too much snooping going on. Like 32gb thumb drives that are actually 64gb and mirror data to the part you can’t access. It would be no trick at all to mirror HD data to a 256gb flash chip on a HD circuit board.
maybe its stored in a cloud?