It is true, unfortunately, that the stick suddenly activates a write protection and thus he (almost) is worthless. I bought the 16GB variant year ago almost 1 and used as a mp3 collection in the car radio. Looked great, because small, and worked until recently in exemplary fashion. Wanted to describe with MP3 on the PC it now, suddenly, the write protection has been Checked-> no write / erase / format possible (And yes, I have all the solutions from Inet tries). The stick is only half full and fortunately it good songs, it can be read even more (the car radio). Habe mir grants a Kingston DataTraveler Micro ordered 16 Gb, which is not quite as small, but seems noisy reviews this write protection failures do not have to be so reliable ...