Which is so weird – second hand market is the best type of recycling: no extra energy or resources are wasted. Things literally get second life immediately. Maybe they get incentives for demonstrating being formally “green” (see, we work with the recycling facility!) even though it’s much worse for the environment than the alternative. Go figure.
If they store data in plaintext at rest they have indeed bigger problems to worry about…
Wasn’t physical destruction of no longer used data devices a requirement for SOC 2 compliance? 
Yeah, my local market of used HDDs is strong. Like, difficult to find an offer below ~80% of the original value of the drive. This is both a curse and a blessing: costly to set up storage for home purposes, but at least resale value is high when storage no longer needed. This is why so far I didn’t have problems buying drives just for Storj despite recommendations against.
No, HIPAA.
(everything that touches PHI: from keyboards to disk drives and every single component/system in between)
Video from a hetzner datacenter showing the shredder… 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StLSMQgAf_Q&t=490s
Knowing that Hetzner reuses drives well past their usual life cycle and being very conservative on HDD replacement even on customer requests, Hetzner probably shreds only used drives too small to be cost-effective to run in terms of power usage. That same video shows how Hetzner tests hardware for reuse, showing just how frugal they are.
The enterprise used HDD market is fuelled more by companies that do not have such sophisticated processes to keep extracting even low margins from old hardware.
This is so bizarre… smart educated people at every level produced an outcome where burning witches physically shredding equipment is an reasonable course of action. (Because someone somewhere does not trust the math?)
I guess it makes no difference from recycling perspective, just bizarre. People scraping encrypted data from raid members is not a threat, people leaving FTP access to the patients data open to the world is.
The lawmakers are not experts in the field in so many cases and they have different opinions about issues. And the experts are not always listened too.
So the lawmakers hear them, don’t understand all the bla bla encryption bla bla, and say: “just to be safe, everything should be destroyed, phisically destroyed”. And in some cases, they are right: encryption, could be safe today, but tomorrow could be broken. Quantum chips are already on the market. Who knows what future brings?
Alternatively, law makers are fully aware of the concept of defense in depth, where you set up multiple ways to secure data in case some layers fail or get broken. Like, wannabe sysadmins who forget to set up encryption or use a password of password; or crypto software that end up using weak RNGs because of a bug; or algorithms being broken.
Happy end of my case with 18TB MG09ACA18TE: next day after manufacturer’s service received my HDD they sent me replacement drive… MG10ACA20TE - 20 TB 
Funny thing is that after they recertify the old one, it will be more reliable than the one you got now. But those extra 2TB sounds sweet.
Another 18TB died today… 
Same system? I would replace power supply.
Four different systems. Also purchased over years, so unlikely a bad production batch.
Ah. Then it’s just hard drives being hard drives.
What about cooling? Did you monitored the discs temperature?
From datasheet on MG09:
Continual or sustained operation at case HDA surface temperature above 40 °C may degrade product reliability.
Oh wow. That’s a very low threshold. Is there explanation for why? Or is this not a threshold it rather “keep it cool” recommendation?
(My disks are specified to 60C. I’m running them at 60C, for ages (literally fan speeds are tied to hottest hdd temp). I did not notice any adverse effects. They mostly are exos, but a few iron wolves, WDs and MD)
I saw 55C on Exos for the entire summer for 4 years. They run like new. 
MGs are so sensitive.
huh that’s the first time I’ve seen that. the operating temperature is up to 60c, but yep, there it is recommending sustained operation under 40c
Enterprise Capacity HDD MG09 Series
generally i’m happy if my drives are under 50c.