Write protection of SanDisk 3.2

Does your USB port support superspeed (5 or 10 Gbit/s)? If not, it may be worth trying one that does. It will probably have a blue insert in the socket. The reason is that the superspeed and lower speed interfaces are completely separate and one may work when the other does not.

It is possible to use superspeed devices with the ordinary USB 1x and 2x connections completely disconnected!

A superspeed controller will first try to detect a superspeed device. If that fails it then looks for a lower speed interface. On the other hand, a USB 2x controller will never look for a superspeed interface.

John

Does it have a part number, like "SDCZ800-064G" ?

I would try it in a second machine, or change OS from Windows to Linux and see if the behavior is confirmed.

The root cause, could be something like this:

Paul

It's a blue port. I don't know if this means USB 2 or USB 3. I tried it in the standard port but the same problem occurred.

I wonder if my PC is not fully compatible with USB 3?

BL210357727W SDCZ48-016G

Unfortunately, I am not skilled enough to install Linux.

This is what I tried. It claimed success but the write protection remained.

It is write protected so not possible to check.

Have you seen this:

Yep, a flash drive going read only is the drive protecting itself so you can get the data off it before it dies. Nothing to do with USB 2 v 3, they'll make no difference.

A few of them have a physical write protect switch, but it's rare.

If it was just Windows being dumb you could still wipe the partitions and reformat it, which suggests it's a deeper problem.

If it's new-ish, and a USB 3.2 drive sounds like it might be, I'd complain to SanDisk.

Theo

There is one other OS-level way this could happen, but this apparently can affect more than just flash drives. You might find secondary hard drives or secondary SSDs also exhibiting the symptoms, if this was the reason.

Paul

Thanks. I was aware that there are issues. I tried the main suggested remedy without success. I'm just going to put it down to experience and buy cheaper USD drives in future :-)

It's been lying around for so long that I don't remember buying it. I only bought it to try out the high speed feature. Besides, I don't want SanDisk reading my data.

I have a couple of micro SDHC cards which have gone rogue & won't format after they were used in a Raspberry-Pi. Tried all the remedies I could find, including diskpart but none worked. Some even told me that they had successfully partitioned a card but they remained in their rogue state.

That gives me an idea. I used the memory stick in my Roku box. I wonder if this corrupted it. It's in the destruction box now (the memory stick, that is).

I know it's possible to kill SD cards by taking power away from them (rather than doing a safe shutdown/unmount), maybe because they were in the middle of a write operation. Perhaps that applies to some USB sticks too? There's a wide range, from 'SD card in a USB adapter', though 'USB microcontroller and a NAND chip' to 'full SSD controller plus a USB to NVMe/SATA adapter'. Perhaps the cheaper end of that spectrum could be more susceptible to power removal, who knows?

Theo