What is the BEST method for ensuring no company data will be exposed before sending drives to an off-site recycler?

Physically destroying the drives is the best method to ensure that no company data will be exposed before sending drives to an off-site recycler. This method guarantees that the data cannot be recovered or accessed by anyone, regardless of their skills or tools. When drives are physically destroyed, they are rendered unusable and secure against any forensic recovery attempts that might be employed on functioning drives.

In contrast, simply deleting files or folders from the drives does not remove the actual data; instead, it just removes the pointers to that data. This means the data can still be recovered using common data recovery tools. Similarly, formatting the drives, which may seem like a more thorough approach than deletion, typically only removes the file system structure and marks the space as available for new data, leaving the original data intact and potentially recoverable. Logging out and powering down the server does not affect the data stored on the drives and does not provide any data sanitization.

Therefore, physically destroying the drives provides the highest level of data security and ensures that sensitive company data cannot be compromised.