Solved: SSD Read Only Mode in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7 (4 Methods Included)

Help, my Samsung SSD stuck in "read only"!

“Recently I bought a Samsung 850EVO 250GB SSD drive to store all my games. It runs great for maybe 2-5 days and then the SSD drive seems to be stuck in a read only mode. I can see it in Windows Explorer and Disk Management, but I cannot download any games on it and the disk itself says that it is ready only in Disk Management! I have tried to change it in the properties, but no luck. Any ides on what else I can do? Please help!”

How to remove read-only attribute from SSD drive?

Generally speaking, when SSD read only mode occurs, you will be unable to modify contents on a file or save new files to it. If you want to add/write new data to a read-only SSD drive, you have to first remove read-only attribute on it and make SSD writable. Next we would tell how to clear read-only status on SSD drives on Windows computer.

• Method 1. Clear read only on SSD drive via Diskpart

• Method 2. Edit the registry key

• Method 3. Run CHDSK to fix read only SSD

• Method 4. Remove read-only attribute by formatting

Method 1. Clear read only on SSD drive via Diskpart

DiskPart is a disk partitioning utility which uses command lines to manage partitions of hard disks including creating partitions, deleting partitions, formatting partitions and so on. Below is how to remove write protection from SSD drive in Diskpart.

Step 1. Open cmd and start Diskpart service: Press “Win+R” button at the same time and type in “cmd”, press Enter. And in the cmd window, type “diskpart” and press Enter.

Step 2. Type “list disk” and press Enter: to get specific information about every disk on your Windows computer.

Step 3. Type “select disk #” and press Enter: # is your drive number (0,1,2,3...), here we select disk 1.

Step 4. Type “attributes disk clear readonly” and press Enter: to remove the write protection on the SSD drive.

Then, the readonly attributes will be cleared successfully. After that, you can input "clean">"create partition primary">"format fs=ntfs" to format the read only SSD to a compatible file system, then you will be able to access data inside it.

Method 2. Edit the registry key

Editing the Registry key is another effective way to disable the write protection on the Solid State Drive.

Step 1. Press “Win+R” button to open Run dialogue and type “regedit”.

Step 2. Navigate to the path below:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

Step 3. Double click the WriteProtect option and modify the value from 1 to 0.

Note: if you don’t find StorageDevicePolicies under Control, do as below:
Step 1. Right click “Control” and select “New”> “Key”. Then name it with StorageDevicePolicies.
Step 2. Right click on the right blank space and go to “New”> “DWORD (32-bit) value”. Name it with Write Protect, then right click on it and select “Modify…”to change the Value data to 0.

Method 3. Run CHDSK to fix read only SSD

Chkdsk is a built-in Check Disk utility for Windows PC to help you fix disk errors. To correct read-only disk error, you just need to type “chkdsk f: /f” in the cmd window (the first f is the drive letter of the read only disk). But in some cases, you might meet error message saying “Windows cannot run disk checking on this volume because it is write protected”. If so, you can try another command “chkdsk g: /f /r /x” to remove write protection on the SSD drive.

Method 4. Remove read-only attribute by formatting

If all the methods don’t resolve the “SSD read only mode” issue, you can try to format it directly. You might have tried that in Disk Management and File Explorer. But failed, right? In Disk Management, the “Format…” option is greyed out for write-protected disk while in File Explorer you will meet the format error “The disk is write protected”.

So here we will highly recommend a powerful disk formatting tool - AOMEI Partition Assistant. It is for you to manage disk/partition in 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8.1/8, Windows 7, Vista and XP. With it, you can format write-protected SSD to FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, Ext2/3/4 successfully.

Note: formatting operation will delete everything on the SSD drive, so recover and backup important data first.

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Step 1. Download the software, install and launch it in your Windows computer. Right click the read only SSD drive partition and select “Format Partition”. 

Step 2. In the mini window, you can select a compatible file system from the given options, here we select NTFS.

Step 3. In the main interface of AOMEI Partition Assistant, click “Apply”> “Proceed” to execute the pending operation.

Summing up

This is all about how to fix “SSD read only mode” issue in Windows. AOMEI Partition Assistant offers the easiest and most effective way to remove write protection from SSD drive. Besides, it can perform other difficult disk/partition management tasks like repairing RAW drive, converting data disk between MBR and GPT styles without data loss, formatting large hard drive (over 32GB) to FAT32.

And you can experience more advanced functions such as migrating OS, allocating free space from one partition to another, spliting a large partition into smaller partitions and recovering lost partitions.