Dead HDD? try to recover data or destroy it?

I remember watching a video on youtube, they tried a number of methods to destroy a drive, and I think making some holes on it was enough that a recovery service was unable to get any data. So I would assume, scratching the surface, making some holes and bending it would be enough? But I would like to recover the data if possible. I’ve seen it’s better to make an image of the drive and then use ddrescue or something like that, but I have no free space to put an image of the size of the drive.. I would need to buy a drive bigger than this drive to make the image file fit then run ddrescue.. this may be too much work already.