Well, if read only is a required feature, there's (as indicated by other answers) products that offers this. Why doesn't modern media generally provide this? With SD card readers, it's simply a bit sent to the software driver for the card reader. What's changed is how much is exposed to the host computer: with floppies, the R/W signal could not be overriden by the host using the standard floppy disk interface. The plastic tab indicated whatever the floppy was write protected or not, but ultimately a drive could be made that ignored it. It was ultimately controlled by the floppy drive. And I haven't even seen it on the really expensive products (except the fake ones on the memory cards mentioned above). It would cost them maybe $0.001 extra per unit to add this.
Why did they go from allowing physical write protection to not even having a silly "pretend-switch" for this? I've never heard anyone mention this, but to me it's absolutely mindblowing and keeps bothering me every single time I take out my backup media on both disks and memory cards and sticks.īeing able to do this is crucial when restoring important backups on potentially malware-infested computers, or when people prone to making honest mistakes are dealing with them and you only want them to be able to fetch/read data but not corrupt/delete it. Not a single one of all my many external USB hard disks, even including an older and bigger 3.5" one, have even any such "pretend-switch" on them. Modern SD cards and SD card converters have a physical such switch, but it does not physically prevent anything and only "advises" the software to not write, which it can ignore at will, rendering it completely meaningless and downright deceptive. It had to be flicked physically and manually by a human being.
No software could bypass that, no matter what. Floppy disks used to have a physical means of preventing writing to them.
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