I had a talk with the head of cyer crime division in antwerp 2 decades ago. If they needed to, they would look at the pieces under a microscope and decipher 1s and 0s from the orientation of the particles...
20 years ago means metal platters, so the sequence of 1's and 0's would have been maintained due to the physical media being intact. When the physical media amounts to a cup of sand, you have no idea as to the sequence of any of those bits. Glass platters have complicated data recovery.