"Three cycles of total format would defeat even Cheltenham's finest."
who are you trying to kid? I routinely recover stuff from drives like that.
Now if you actually completely zero the drive using a diagnostic tool then yes, it becomes much much harder - but I don't think you're talking about that are you?
Recovering data from a formatted drive is easy. Even one that has been formatted multiple times
Thats why I suggested using DBAN - using that makes it almost impossible to recover