Once it rattles after you pick it up you're golden. No recovery.
Ths is a common misconception.
Hard drive destruction/data recovery is yet another example of the theft protection scale. Basically, the theft protection scale is an axis. On one side is the amount of effort you're willing to invest in stopping someone getting at your data. On the other is the effort a third party is willing to invest in getting your data. You need to set your "protection effort" at a point slightly greater than your estimate of the "getting effort" someone's likely to expend. If you have financial information or illegal data on the drive, then you should increase the effort. In general, unless you're a celeb or a terrorist, then the "getting effort" is likely to be pretty low.
The reason that the "drop it till it rattles" advice is a misconception is twofold.
Firstly, hard drive platters are no longer highly reactive to oxygen. Previously, all you had to do to screw the magnetic pattern on a drive was to expose it to oxygen. The ferrous coating would oxidise and lose its magnetism. Hey presto, data gone. This isn't the case any more. As data densities have increased, the reactivity of the platters has been lowered. This seems somewhat paradoxic, but is to do with increasing the head accuracy, and preventing adjacent sectors from reacting to a head pass.
Secondly, drive heads park much more efficiently than previously. When was the last time you heard of someone's laptop hard drive crashing because they put it down too hard? Exactly. 12 years in corporate IT, and it's NEVER happened to me or any of my users.
So we're now in a position where the best way of destroying data on a hard drive is to do the 7+ wipe mechanism. You have to
completely rewrite the drive with junk
a minimum of 7 times to be able to stop the data recovery pros getting at it.
And with a drive build time of around 12hrs per TB (SATA2), that sounds pretty dull compared to hitting it repeatedly with the largest hammer you can find.
To make the data on the drive unrecoverable, you need to stop your data recovery people being able to orient themselves on the platters. And to do that, you basically need to deform the platters so that they can't spin. Your tolerance here is the distance between the platters. If you can bend the platters enough that a disk head cannot physically move between the platters, you're pretty much set.
So, find a big hammer, and (to quote Homer), smash it good. I can personally vouch for the sheer satisfaction of the impact shock rolling up your arm after you drop a 4lb lump hammer on a hard drive.
A note from the health & safety weenies: Hitting a mixture of plastic, metal and silicon repeatedly with a large blunt instrument can cause particle fragmentation. You're advised to take care of your eyes during this delicate data erasure operation.
x 10
Possibly watermelon too. Oh, and if people ask what you're doing you'll always have the 'Just making a fruit salad' excuse. 
And BTW, this was a laptop drive, and you can see by the connectors.
