Write Protected USB Sticks / USB Flash Drives If there is no need to write data to the USB stick / USB flash drive it can be a good idea to distribute USB sticks that are write protected. Many USB sticks have a hardware switch that can be used to turn on write protection. If you distribute your USB stick with write protection turned on, it will not be possible to change the contents of the USB flash drive via software. The drive will be read-only.   If for some reason the user wants to store data on the USB stick, he/she can turn off the write protection temporarily and save data on the drive.   The picture above shows a USB stick with a write protection switch. The switch enables the user to easily swap between read-only and read/write modes. < Go back