Flash drives also have all of the necessary equipment for it to be read. I wonder how much data per gram the actual storage part of the flash drive actually is. I doubt it's better than DNA, but I think it might be disingenuous for the article to be offering the analogy to hard drives without taking into account the extra read/write hardware.
agreed, it should be comparied to other arhival media like tape drives; but it's still pretty similar; we compare in our paper a hard drive platter rather than a drive itself. even then we are approximately ~million fold more dense
