I have an old trusted no-brand 4GB USB Flash drive with a hardware write protection switch that is with untrusted PCs.

While 4GB is not much, it is more than sufficient for this particular purpose. However, recently I started noticing that write speeds on this thing are getting more and more sluggish. A quick test with AS SSD revealed that it wasn’t just my imagination – an average write rate was just over 2MB/s. I don’t remember this drive being so slow, so it’s probably an ageing flash memory issue.

So, it’s time to a replacement. Unfortunately, that’s more easily said than done. A quick trip to Curries and Maplins was in vain – no USB devices with write protection were available. A sales advisor at Maplins suggested using an SD card with SD to USB adapter, which seems like a reasonable workaround, but I believe that write protection switches on SD cards are not hardware/firmware based. They simply instruct the Operating System to treat the device read-only, but in no way can enforce it. 

I then turned my attention to online stores, including eBay and Amazon. Most of the USB flash drives with write protection I found were very small capacity, ancient USB 2.0 drives with ridiculously expensive price tags. I doubt they would be much faster than the one I was trying to replace…

Eventually, I came across the Kanguru SS3 USB 3.0 drive that actually advertises hardware write protection as a major feature. In the US, the 16GB version can be bought for around $40. In the UK, the cheapest was Amazonco.co.uk with £37. That’s quite expensive for a 16GB flash drive, but it’s not completely unreasonable providing the drive is well-built and has good read/write rates. The manufacturer advertises maximum read/write speeds as 230MB/sec and 170MB/sec respectively. Seems like a winner!

03.2015