Fever dream? Or software I can't remember...

[burritoincognito]

I could swear that about a decade ago, there was something available that you could use on a USB flash drive, and depending on whether it was locked or unlocked, would make it read only or writable, especially useful for dealing with malware-infected machines. It wasn't a hardware switch, it was some piece of software that could run on any flash drive.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

[cyclone3d]

Have a look here - there are a few mentions of software that can do this with USB sticks that have certain controllers on them:

Make some content on USB drive read only