WD Blue SN550 nvme, locked as a read only drive

WD SSD Products WD SSD Drives & Software
#1

Drive locked in READ ONLY mode.
Windows 11 ran update and system crashed after restart saying MBR not found. Had to reloaded windows on another drive, tried to format, partition, disk manager, partition magic even tried to edit registry and all other ways I could find to recover the drive, but nothing worked to remove READ ONLY status. I don’t care about the data, just want the drive working again.
Any ideas???

Going to try and return to WD for a new one, too soon to say what they will do.

#2

If you have set the write protection on your own by setting up a password then you can simply remove it all by yourself. If your SSD is locked through third party software then simply open up the software to unlock it with your password.

#3

I never set a password or changed write protection, it was fully functional online until the windows update restart, then it locked up for no good apparent reason.
All attempts to reset or unlock have failed miserably .

#4

Usually when a drive enters a read only mode (initiated by the drive’s firmware, it is due to an unrecoverable error being detected such that it no longer trusts the NAND anymore.

While some data recovery shops have ways of re-flashing the firmware chip to clear that lock, they will charge a lot and it is often just done if the lock is getting in the way of any other data recovery tool they are using.

In your situation, if you have backups of the data, it is best to RMA the drive.

PS keep in mind that without changing the model, WD changed the NAND in the SN550 to a lower bin or possibly even QLC, thus their newer drive has lower overall performance.