How to Make USB Drives Read Only (Disable USB storage Write)

In this article we will show you how to make USB storage device read only.You may think that what is the need of making USB drive read only, there are so many reasons why one would want his USB drives such as Pen drives or external hard disks to be read-only.

• To block users from writing files to external drives.
• To prevent the USB Devices from viruses or malwares
• Data present in the USB Storage Device Cannot be modified
• To prevent write access on your computer’s USB ports.

How to Make USB Storage Devices Read Only

Follow the steps mentioned below to setup USB storage devices read only:

1. Click Start > Run > Type ‘regedit‘ and then press Enter.

2. Navigate to following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

3. Right click on control, navigate to new and create new key, Change the name as StorageDevicePolicies

4. Right click on it, navigate to new DWORD and name it as WriteProtect

5. Right click on it, modify 0 as 1 in the value

6. Once done, close the registry and restart the system for changes to take effect. The USB ports on your computer are now read only !

To make them capable of writing data again, change the value of the WriteProtect key to 0.

1. Open Registry Editor

2. Navigate to following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

3. In the right pane, double-click “WriteProtect”.

4. In the Value data box, enter 0, and then click OK.

5. Quit Registry Editor.

Hope this helps !