Comment Re:security (Score 1) 168
Just erase the data, and then sell them!
Which is what you say when you are clueless about everything that is actually involved. Wiping a large number of drives, and verifying that 100% of them really were completely wiped, is far more expensive that just shredding them.
And you may not even be able to verify that the drive was completely erased -- modern ATA drives have a "secure erase" feature (and many (most?)) SCSI drives do too, but I don't think you can verify that remapped bad blocks were completely erased.
Full disk encryption helps, but configuration mistakes happen, maybe a mistake in provisioning scripts meant that a rack of servers didn't get FDE set up properly and plain text data was written to the drive before it was discovered and corrected.