While I agree with the posters who say chances are nobody is going to waste their time with that drive and you should not be too concerned about returning it, the fact is that there are many crooks and weirdos in the world. They are the exception but they do exist and it is up to you to decide the risk level you are comfortable assuming.
I have had several checks lost in the mail and took the risk of not stopping payment on them.
Only you can decide what the risk is worth to you. If it is just credit card numbers and account information, seeing the information is not that valuable to begin with I would just return it. OTOH if you have truly valuable information which you just cannot afford the risk of it falling into other hands, then $200 seems like a low price to pay to keep it safe.
BTW, this is the least of your worries. Every important file on my computer drive is encrypted, not because I foresee your situation but in case my computer is stolen, has to be sent to repair or whatever, is hacked, or whatever. Encrypting your files is cheap insurance.
The computer business is incredibly competitive. Even if your drive were total junk, some beancounter will want to have it for scrap or warranty value. Everyone you talk to at Dell has to follow the rules or Dell will find someone who will.
The guy getting your old disk has handled 1000 disks before seeing yours. He doesn’t want your data. He wants a beer. He doesn’t care if you’ve ‘accidently’ dropped your drive. No one does. It’s one of several car loads of drives that were priced out several decimal points.
But as long as you’re already angry…the guy at Dell assumes you’re worried because your drive is full of child porn. And he still doesn’t care.
Why do we like to treat people like dummies so much? If you’re not paranoid enough about your data, some condescending nerd is going to say “you know how easy it would be to get your data off that drive?” and if you are paranoid, some condescending nerd says, “pshaw, like someone’s interested in your ever-so-precious data.”
Personally, I think it was a good question, and I wouldn’t be worried so much about someone at Dell fiendishly digging into the data…I’d be worried that the institutional incompetence of a company like Dell (not a dig on Dell specifically, just big-company-head-up-ass-ness) is going to end up taking the drive, doing some minor refurb on it, not bothering to format it, and then sending it out to some other customer who says “hey, lookit. credit card numbers!”
I agree with everything galt had to say. I think Scarlett67’s question was a good one and wish more people at least took the time to consider the risks.
Personally, I don’t store this kind of data on disk ever but if you’re going to, then consider doing file or filesystem encryption.
You concern is based on mis-information about how hard drives are “serviced” at the OEM level which is where they ultimately go if they are going to be replaced or swapped out. If the hard drive is going to be re-furbished and not trashed the beginning stage for any service is going to be a low level format of the media assuming the onboard electronics check out. There is no “minor refurb” sans a low level format.
A low level format is not the same as the “format” you perform after partitoning a disk. This is the actual writing of the data tracks on the blank platter and, in the case of modern IDE hard drives, can only be done with special and quite expensive equipment. No data will survive this process. Period.