Question Does any reputable manufacturer still make USB Flashdrives with a write-protect switch?

[Cyber_Akuma]

Yes, I know I can find those on Aliexpress, and random unheard of Hong Kong or Chinese names on Amazon... but I would trust those about as much as I would trust a RAID 0 made out of a hundred Darkstar drives.

Are there any respectable brands that still make drives like these? I help troubleshoot computer problems for friends and family, and I want to create bootable live-USBs of tools and applications to assist with this. Issue is that half the time it's a malware infection, and I don't want to risk infecting said USB drives, so I wanted a switch that physically disables writes that I can switch them to read-only when using them and only enable writes when I am manually updating them myself. Back when optical drives were still standard this wasn't an issue, but now that those are long gone for 99% of people...

 

[Misgar]

In similar situations, I've installed antivirus hunting tools on a fast SD card, moved the slider switch on the side of the card to the write protect position, then inserted it in a USB SD card reader.

 

[Cyber_Akuma]

I heard that apparently for most SD cards (and even USB drives that used to have a switch) that the switch is not actually a physical hardware cutoff of the write enable but just simply software? If that is true, then it makes it useless for the purpose I mentioned, since that software can be overridden in much the same way dodgy bootleg flash media overrides it's reported size. Any known confirmed hardware cutoff ones?