Unless it was faulty, that was a thoroughly reckless act of wasteful stupidity on a perfectly good 1TB WD hard drive.
A good secure wipe would've been enough to prevent any miscreant from performing dodgy data recovery on it.
Dot Matrix, on 11 April 2013 - 13:13, said:
Once the control board is dead, that's it, there's nothing no one can do with that.
Except replace the dead control board with fully functional identical control board.