a) why the fuck would they go to that effort for a filthy commoner like yourself, and b) what are the chances that 0.01% of recoverable data contains anything useful!?!

Nobody is gonna bother doing advanced forensics on 2nd hand storage, digging into megabytes of reallocated sectors on the off chance they to find something financially exploitable. That’s a level of paranoia no data supports.

My example applies to storage devices which don’t default to encryption (most non-OS external storage). It’s analogous to changing your existing encrypted disks password to a random-ass unrecoverable throwaway.