Why Flash Drives are "Write Protected"

Roshen

Distinguished
Dec 13, 2013
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Few of my pen drives were write protected. (Imation Nano Pro, Sandisk Cruzer Blade, ..)
What is this "Write Protected?
Why does it happen?
How to minimize the risk/s?
 

Vynavill

Honorable
I don't know the reason myself, but I believe that a logical conclusion would be that it's useful for an extra layer of protection.

USB drives are generally one of the favourite virus diffusion mediums. Obviously, anything written in a clever enough manner can bypass that (there are free utilities or even shell commands that remove such protection, as long as it's not a physical switch on the USB drive), but if you're inserting that drive into an unknown PC, there are good chances it can get infected. Write protection prevents that by setting the entire drive as read only.

They should, however, allow you to choose. If they come software-write-protected out of the box, meaning there's no switch you can flip to disable it, something's pretty much wrong.
 

Roshen

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Dec 13, 2013
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Thanks for the reply Owl! :)
Viruses were my 'suspects' too. But then I got 3 flash drives write protected in one week on 3 different computers.
None of them had nothing in common, except Avast Antivirus and Windows Defender; Not criticizing, just the only common thing I saw. :D
Thanks again for the reply! ;)
 

randomizer

Champion
Moderator
You can usually remove the write protection if you want to. There are probably a few ways to do it depending on how it is protected, but I usually just blow away the partition and recreate it. It's the sledgehammer approach but at least I know it will work :) Of course it completely destroys any data on the drive.
 

mySenpai

Commendable
Jun 30, 2016
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We have the same Problem my Friend