[light_cone]

I have some of these usb keys, and I remember having remounted the device rw on linux, and the device failed with an io error when I attempted to write. So if I'm correct, the driver was configured as if the key was rw, but it failed because the hardware switch was ro.

So I believe that it is an actual hardware lock, in addition to the os having the ro/rw status info.

If someone is interested, Kanguru have faster models than the one linked (which I have too), which is a little slow by today's standard.