Make USB Storage Devices Read-only

There may be several reasons why one would want his USB drives such as Flash drives or external hard disks to be read-only. A few reasons would be,

• To prevent someone from stealing data on our computer
• To prevent our USB drive from getting infected with virus when plugged into other people’s computer.
• Don’t want the data present in the pen drive to be modified.

This can be dealt easily using the below two ways.

Prevent Write Access to USB Storage Devices

1. Start > Run > enter “regedit” to open the registry editor on your system.
2. Navigate to the following registry key
   

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

3. Create a new DWORD under this key with a name called “WriteProtect” and assign 1 as its value.
4. That’s it! All the USB storage devices on your computer are now read-only. To revert back to the original state, simply change the “WriteProtect” key to 0.

If you’re worried about handling your registry editor, simply use the Thumbscrew or Wenovo USB disk access manager tools instead of following the above process.

Make USB Flash Drive Read-Only

USB Dummy Protect is a freeware utility that sits in your pen drive and takes up all the available free space on the drive, thus letting no data to be entered into the drive. It makes the USB drive read-only.

Simply, copy the .exe file to the USB drive and run it. A dummy file will be created and the tool allocates all the remaining or available space to it. If you ever want to add or copy some data in future, simply delete the dummy file.

NOTE: Using NTFS file system on USB drives will enhance their efficiency.