Some people think the extreme methods are overkill, but be careful. Data recovery services are capable of pretty amazing things. Beyond the typical melted in a fire/accidentally demagnetized/encrypted and forgot password stuff they can recover data from some really weirdly damaged disks.

I found an email I remembered forwarding to some friends a year ago from a cnet news.com article on the strangest jobs Kroll Ontrack had this past year. In all these cases they recovered the data.

• In the middle of an argument, a businessman threw a USB stick at his partner, with the device ending up in several pieces on the floor. Unfortunately it contained valuable company plans.

• A scientist was fed up with his hard drive squeaking, so he drilled a hole through the casing and poured in oil, stopping both the squeaking and the hard drive.

• To test the functionality of a parachute, a camera was dropped
from a plane. The parachute failed and the camera shattered into several pieces, but the device's memory stick was reassembled and the footage was recovered.

• After discovering ants had taken up residence in his external
hard drive, a photographer took the cover off and sprayed the interior
with insect repellent. The ants were killed off and the data was eventually recovered.