Wii U Hard Drive Recommendations

[mdoerty]

I just discovered that the hard drive that I have had hooked up to my Wii U since launch is no longer being recognized.  This has occurred in the last two months.  And since it does not appear when I plug it into my computer, I am guessing it is toast. 

 

Obviously, I need to get a new unit. 

What recommendations do people have for a drive since the models Nintendo recommended years ago no longer exist. 

 

Thanks

[+slx]

I use a 500GB 2,5" HD I had from a notebook upgrade in a "generic" enclosure, attached to the rear USB ports with a Y-cable. Works fine so far and only very occasionally needs to be re-plugged.

 

My absolute preference would be a USB SSD that does not need the Y cable but all the ones I had around failed to work without the Y cable. 

[MaDDuck]

I've used the same Toshiba HDD hooked up with a Y cable to the USB ports on the back and it works perfectly! I would LOVE to go SSD on it and see if it will load any faster...

[Asaki]

I bought an SD card to try with a USB reader, but haven't tried it out yet.

 

Nintendo's official FAQ says not to use SD, but they don't say why. Every other console of theirs reads/writes SD... *shrug*

 

With the eShop going down, I'm going to have to try it real soon... ¬_¬

[Atariboy]

On 1/14/2023 at 9:52 PM, Asaki said:

With the eShop going down, I'm going to have to try it real soon... ¬_¬

It's not going down soon. Purchasing is ending in March, but the shop is staying for now with no shutdown announced.

[Asaki]

5 minutes ago, Atariboy said:

It's not going down soon. Purchasing is ending in March, but the shop is staying for now with no shutdown announced.

I have stuff I still need to purchase, but currently not enough internal space to do so.

[Atariboy]

That's what I mean. The store isn't disappearing anytime very soon for redownloading purchases. Only purchasing games is ending.

 

So you can make your purchases now and worry about long-term storage later on, if your solution doesn't work and you don't purchase an external drive before March.

[LynxJagLunatic]

My Wii U won’t recognize my HDD but does my 256GB thumb drive. 

[Asaki]

I think I need to get another thumb drive.
I tried using a Switch branded SD card with the WiiU...it formats it, then reports it as being 2000 something gigs (it is not), and it tries to copy files over and fails.

Popped it in the Switch and it formatted it and it worked just fine =|
Popped it back in the WiiU and still no dice.

[Asaki]

Got a thumb drive, everything's gravy now B)

 

...now I just gotta go through the eShop and see what I can afford... =|

[Atariboy]

It's a moot point now for you, but just in case it helps someone else, once again you actually didn't need to wait to figure out a storage solution before buying the games you wanted. What's ending in late March with the Wii U and 3DS eShops is purchasing, not the downloading of past purchases. You could've worried about downloading your purchases after March without an issue.

 

For an illustration, I bought what's likely my last round of 3DS downloads last night. They ended up way too much to fit on the factory installed SD card on the system (I believe it's a 4 GB micro SD card on a New 2DS XL). Yet I was able to buy all 11 of my games just the same. And while there needs to be enough room to download a purchase or the Wii U or 3DS eShop won't allow you to even buy it, all I had to do was keep the download queue cleared to maintain enough free SD card space for each purchase

 

The 1,000 blocks reserved for the first game that I purchased for instance might've prevented the next game that's 1,500 blocks in size (the 3DS doesn't measure download sizes in MB's) from being allowed to be purchased if I only had 750 blocks left free. But by cancelling that download of my first purchase, I cleared that 1,000 block reservation and freed up enough space to let me buy my next game. Rinse and repeat until finished.

 

I have some downloading to do when I upgrade to a larger card, but that doesn't have to happen by this deadline if I don't get around to it since the eShop is sticking around for the redownloading of past purchases. And now with all the games that I wanted purchased and tied to my account, I can download them at my leisure to my 3DS with no imminent deadline to beat.

Edited March 16, 2023 by Atariboy

[Asaki]

3 hours ago, Atariboy said:

And while there needs to be enough room to download a purchase or the Wii U or 3DS eShop won't allow you to even buy it, all I had to do was keep the download queue cleared to maintain enough free SD card space for each purchase

 

The 1,000 blocks reserved for the first game that I purchased for instance might've prevented the next game that's 1,500 blocks in size (the 3DS doesn't measure download sizes in MB's) from being allowed to be purchased if I only had 750 blocks left free. But by cancelling that download of my first purchase, I cleared that 1,000 block reservation and freed up enough space to let me buy my next game. Rinse and repeat until finished.

So, what you're telling me, is that I DID need more free space in order to make a purchase...

[Atariboy]

6 hours ago, Asaki said:

So, what you're telling me, is that I DID need more free space in order to make a purchase...

You need enough free space for the biggest game of the bunch that you plan to purchase, yes. But it's entirely optional to have enough free space to accommodate every single thing that you already owned and all your newly made purchases when all is said and done.

 

You've came up with your solution so this is all unimportant for you personally now, but just in case it helps someone else that waits until closer to the deadline that may read this thread, let's use my 3DS example again. Let's say that I have 40,000 blocks of space in total on my SD card and 39,000 blocks are occupied by previous downloadable games and such that I've acquired through the years. And the largest game size that I'm planning on purchasing takes 1,500 blocks. I can't actually buy that game as-is since I lack the space on my SD card with a 500 block deficit and thus the eShop won't let me purchase it. But now it's a trivial matter of simply deleting an existing download of at least 500 blocks in size to clear that room.

 

Now I can buy my 1,500 block game and as I long as I then clear the download queue after that purchase to clear the 1,500 block reservation that the download made, I can rinse and repeat this process as needed until I'm finished. Then it's a simple matter of acquiring a bigger SD card later on, transferring my existing SD contents to it, and then downloading all my recent purchases that are now in my purchase history to my new memory card (as well as remembering to redownload the 500 block game that I already owned but had temporarily deleted to clear some room).

Thanks to the eShop not actually closing this month (Only purchasing is getting disabled), there's not actually a need to rush to come up with a final storage solution. For instance if your USB thumb drive dies down the road (Nintendo actually recommends against using them for Wii U game storage), as long as the eShop is still online you'll be able to retrieve all your downloads.

Edited March 16, 2023 by Atariboy

[Asaki]

4 hours ago, Atariboy said:

For instance if your USB thumb drive dies down the road (Nintendo actually recommends against using them for Wii U game storage)...

And I don't know why they do, because it's essentially the same technology that the internal storage is using. Ditto to the Switch.

[Atariboy]

Wii U software supposedly wasn't designed with flash memory wear out awareness and is heavy on disk I/O read/writing.

 

I personally think that it's fine for how I use it. Small programs like Virtual Console downloads that are load everything into RAM when starting a game and only writing back when something like a save state is made, storing rarely played games, etc. 

 

While I intend to do something more proper down the road, a USB thumb drive has been a cost effective stopgap that has served well enough for several years. But with what I've learned, I'd personally avoid something like playing my download of Wind Waker HD directly off it from start to finish before transferring it to the system's internal storage.

Edited March 17, 2023 by Atariboy

[Tempest]

I've been using a cheapo portable drive I got off Amazon (a Bipra or something like that).  I have all my discs backed up to and it works great.  I even played Xenoblade Chronicles X to 100% completion from it (about 180 or so hours) and had no troubles even though I left it on for 20 hours+ at times.  If that's not a stress test then I don't know what is.

[eightbit]

As mentioned, with most modern portable drives you will need a USB Y-cable so that you can connect the drive to BOTH usb ports on the Wii U. That is because the ports do not provide enough power to power a drive over one port.

 

That is not a big deal, but personally I prefer powered drives....that is drives that come with their own power brick. They are getting less common but they are out there.

 

You also want to make sure to get a 2TB or less drive. 

 

I ended up finding a NOS WD Elements 2TB powered drive on Mercari for $30. It was new and unused. Another idea is to just purchase a powered USB HDD enclosure and then stick a cheap internal 2TB drive inside of it.

 

 

 

Edited April 18, 2023 by eightbit

[eightbit]

I should add that while I said "make sure to get a 2TB or less drive", you don't have to. You can use a 3TB for example, BUT the Wii U will only see 2TB of it. Kind of a waste... so for that reason alone I recommend 2TB or less.

[bluejay]

It's not as if you're gonna need any more than 2TB either. My setup is very spartan with 32GB internal storage plus a 16GB thumb drive and it's just about enough to store the essentials. I would reckon that, unless you're one of those people who prefer to hoard as many games as possible, 256GB at most should be plenty.

 

[eightbit]

8 hours ago, bluejay said:

It's not as if you're gonna need any more than 2TB either. My setup is very spartan with 32GB internal storage plus a 16GB thumb drive and it's just about enough to store the essentials. I would reckon that, unless you're one of those people who prefer to hoard as many games as possible, 256GB at most should be plenty.

 

 

Exactly. The Wii U also has a limit of 300 icons. That includes folders of icons too, so 300 and that's it. 300 titles would not equate to 2TB. I am not sure it would even equal 1TB as not all games are large at all. You can't even partition the drive and use half for Wii games or something else. If it is a Wii U drive, it is ALL a Wii U drive

 

I would definitely recommend a new drive as they are cheap and I wouldn't want to put trust into a used drive personally.

 

Edited April 19, 2023 by eightbit

[eightbit]

On 3/16/2023 at 3:49 PM, Atariboy said:

Thanks to the eShop not actually closing this month (Only purchasing is getting disabled), there's not actually a need to rush to come up with a final storage solution. For instance if your USB thumb drive dies down the road (Nintendo actually recommends against using them for Wii U game storage), as long as the eShop is still online you'll be able to retrieve all your downloads.

 

Although that is the stance for now, we all know that the ability to download already purchased titles will go away at some point. They aren't going to pay for and continue to host that content for a dwindling audience.The original Wii shop ran 13 years until they finally gave it the ax completely. Opened in 2006 and closed fully in 2019. You can no longer obtain your purchases at all.

 

The 3DS shop and Wii U shop opened in 2011 and 2012 respectively. 2024 will be 13 years for the 3DS shop and 2025 for the Wii U shop. I would wager that these are the years they will completely shut both shops down for redownloading your purchases with each having a run of 13 years. It was OK for them to do this on the Wii where you had a MUCH larger install base and I am sure many more shop purchases than these two combined. So, it is a REALLY safe bet they will follow this course.

 

That said, yeah, you have SOME time. I won't get into how much I despise the whole idea of "renting" games, but lets just say there are ways of backing up your purchases for good and storing them on alternate media so that you can actually keep them. I am not sure of the legality of such a thing (even though you had purchased them in the past, I don't believe it is legal to do) but screw that. It is exactly what I did and I can install/uninstall/reinstall them any time I want outside of Nintendo. I just wish I did that with my PS3 store purchases before it was too late. 

[Atariboy]

The Wii eShop is still online in 2023 for redownloading past purchases (as is the DSi shop).

 

And in reference to it being too late for you to do anything with your PS3 store purchases, the PS3 shop is still online in 2023 as well.

Edited April 19, 2023 by Atariboy

[eightbit]

6 minutes ago, Atariboy said:

The Wii eShop is still online in 2023 for redownloading past purchases (as is the DSi shop).

You are correct, I guess I misread:

 

https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/27560/~/wii-shop-channel-discontinuation

 

Still don't like:

 

"In the future, we will be closing all services related to the Wii Shop Channel, including redownloading purchased WiiWare, Virtual Console titles, and Wii Channels, as well as Wii System Transfer Tool, which transfers data from the Wii console to the Wii U console."

 

So they have not committed to a date, but they have definitely committed to not allowing you to download your purchases "in the future"

 

I bet my bottom dollar that future they speak of will happen before you know it. Still, I commend them for keeping it going as long as they have. Still no reason to sit around and "relax" on downloading all of your stuff from dead eShops in my opinion however. I would get it all now to be safe.

Edited April 19, 2023 by eightbit

[Atariboy]

Nobody likes it. But everyone obviously knew from day 1 that online digital storefronts aren't eternal and that a shutdown would happen after a few years had passed.

 

And I never suggested someone wait for years on end before securing their purchases. What I said is if you don't have the space today (when we down to just a few days left for purchasing games), don't let that stop you from making your planned purchases since you can take care of that even after purchasing is discontinued.

 

Further, Nintendo has been very good with advance warning of online discontinuations. So it seems quite unlikely that the ability to redownload past purchases will disappear without warning. And the long and still continuing life of the Wii and DSi shops years after purchasing was disabled suggests it's not happening anytime particularly soon.

[eightbit]

Don't get me wrong, I am a realist and I knew full well that these stores would end....and will continue to end as time goes on. Even Steam will end at some point.

 

But, what I would love to see (and I realize this is also a pipe dream) is for the endings to go out with an olive branch being extended to the customer in such a way that they provide a means to really "keep" your purchases...and not just allowing them to be downloaded to the console they are locked to. A true backup that you can store on alternate media like a PC hard drive or a USB flash drive and install them on your console at will when these services are completely gone. Granted I made that very thing happen on my own, but officially would be more preferred of course. 

 

Again, I realize fully that will not happen for various reasons, but it would be great if it were possible. If everyone had a GOG model...yeah...we would not have these worries at all. But alas, it is what it is.

Edited April 19, 2023 by eightbit