Write protecting WDC WUH721818ALE6L4 WD Ultrastar DC HC550 3,5'' HDD 18TB

[Bolster]

I have a hard drive with important data on it.
It’s a regular spinning hard drive.
It sits in a box that converts from SATA to
USB so you can connect it to any computer
any .The entire disk is formatted in NTFS.

My question is: Is it possible to somehow write-protect the disk
so that regardless of whether you connect it to a computer that
have Apple Mac-OS or MS-Windows or Linux OS
or other OS

You should therefore be able to read everything on the disk but not write to it
the !

Is this even possible? I know it is on e.g.
SD-card a small “flarp” that you can move on from time to time
write protection is activated.

And : I am NOT talking about Write protection in the file system: One way is to use the properties of the file system to put write protection on the entire disk. Since your hard drive is formatted in NTFS, you can use Windows commands to enable write protection for the entire disk. Connect the drive to a Windows computer and open a command prompt. Then type the following command:

attrib +r E:\* /S /D

Here, replace “E:” with the letter of your hard drive. This command marks all files and folders on the disk as read-only.

Because the disk must be totally WRITE PROTECTED and via a SWITCH
possible to enable OR disable the Write Protectiion= READ ONLY !

[fzabkar]

You need a USB-SATA bridge that supports write protect. Here are two:

https://en.sharkoon.com/product/27408#desc

https://www.delock.com/produkt/62652/merkmale.html

ISTR that I once encountered a reference circuit for a regular bridge that had a write protect option. This suggests that standard circuits could be modified to include this feature.

[darrontrosclairson]

Yes, it’s possible to achieve a write-protected state for your hard drive, regardless of the operating system used to connect it. However, it involves more than just the file system write protection. To fully accomplish this, you would need an external switch or mechanism that physically toggles the write protection state on the hard drive.

For SD cards, the small “flarp” switch you mentioned is a hardware-based mechanism that physically prevents writing. Unfortunately, not all hard drives have such a switch built-in.