Wrong description of security and flash drives

In an article Computer Sweden claim that flash based hard drives has less security than normal rotating hard drives. My friend Joachim Strömbergsson is interviewed and he agree it is harder to extract the information from a hard drive than a flash drive.

But, as he explain in a blog entry, he talks about how easy/hard it is to extract the information from the interior of a flash based drive compared to a rotating drive.

The absolutely easiest way to grab the data is of course to just connect the hard drive to a different computer, interpret the file system and read the data from it. And this is just as easy (maybe even easier) to do with a rotating hard drive as a flash based one.

Because of this, as Joachim explain over and over again, the only way to secure data is to encrypt the hard drive.

The statement that flash based drives should have less security than rotating hard drives is from a normal user perspective just plain wrong.

Updated: I have had a separate discussion with Joachim, and I now understand what he is trying to explain. If one have the need for the data, and the drive itself is protected, for example via an ATA password, then one attack vector is to open the drives and access the interior. In that case a flash based drive is easier to manage because extracting data from the disks in a drive need much more complicated hardware, clean room etc. But on the other hand, if ATA password is in use, there are other attack vectors can be used. It is also the case that the number of cases the ATA password is turned on is extremely low.

So in reality, there is not much difference between accessing the drive itself and accessing the interior. And if one read the last part of Joachims blog carefully, you see that the only way to protect yourself is to encrypt the data on your hard drive.