Homebrew Tutorial  Updated

SDUSB - The modern way to play Wii U games from SD - at full speed

Why?

Even though the Wii U has a built in SD slot, it doesn't support using it as a storage expansion to store Wii U games (unlike it's predecessor). USB pen drives are notoriously unreliable and hard drives are bulky and require extra power or a Y cable, using up multiple ports. Today big reliable SD cards have become cheap. Since a SD is needed anyway for homebrew, it would be nice to use that too as storage for games.
There have been solutions in the past like Loadiine, but this had various problems, the biggest of them performance and is not longer supported by current homebrew environments (Aroma).

SDUSB

SDUSB solves these problems. It uses a second partition on the SD card, which will be formatted to the Wii Us native file system and therefore run at full speed. The partition will show up as a USB device and can therefore be managed using the built in Data Management in the system settings. SaveMii, WUP Installers etc. all work with this, like it is a USB storage device. Also HAI (VC Wii Titles) work with SDUSB.
SDUSB does all that by patching IOSU (the OS that runs on the ARM processor). It is implemented as a stroopwafel plugin.


Prerequisites

You need two things:
  1. a way to launch minute
  2. a reliable SD card
For 1. the recommended way is to setup ISFShax, for that we have a guide here: How to set up ISFShax
If you don't want to commit to installing ISFShax yet you can skip the "Installing ISFShax" step in the ISFShax setup guide and instead run it manually through the chosen exploit on every reboot.
Instead if ISFShax you can also use defuse, in case you have that already.

For 2. It is highly recommended that you use an Endurance branded SD card from a reputable brand. Since your save games will also be saved there, you rather want to spend $5 more then to lose all your save games because your cheapo sd card died. Also be aware of fakes, even on Amazon you can get fake SD cards...
The speed of the SD card isn't too important, as the Wii U is limited to 25MB/s (same as the internal memory) anyway. Every somewhat recent SD card should be able to get that speed. Choose Reliability > Access Time > Throughput.

Setup

Partitioning the SD card​

On Windows you need to use a third party tool like Minitool Partition Wizard or Easeus, on Linux you can use gparted.
You need to have two primary partitions on the card:
  1. FAT32 - (in gparted set lba flag). This is what the PC will see and all your homebrew goes (you should already have this)
  2. NTFS - This partition will be the "USB", you use to store the Wii U games on (don't assign a drive letter)
Shrink the existing FAT32 partition to make room and then create the primary NTFS partition after it. It's recommended to align the Partitions on 64MiB boundaries and use a multiple of 64MiB for the size. NTFS won't be the file system the Wii U will be using, it is just there to tell SDUSB which partition to use (it will pick the first NTFS one). The Wii U will later format it with it's own file system.

​

Installing the Plugin​

Get the latest wafel_sd_usb.ipx from here: https://github.com/jan-hofmeier/wafel_sd_usb/releases and place it in your ios_plugins folder. That is either wiiu/ios_plugins on the SD card or /sys/hax/ios_plugins on the slc. For slc you have to rename it to something shorter like sdusb.ipx

Using SDUSB

If you now boot boot back up, the Partition shows up as a USB device, which needs to be formatted and can then be used as usual. After formatting the SDUSB, you can also connect an existing USB storage and copy stuff over.
sdusb.jpg

Known Problems

  • GC VC Injectes don't work when installed to the SDUSB (they still work from Internal Memory)
 
Last edited by SDIO,
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ber71

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Interesting.
However, I can't see any real advantages. This setup is way complicated vs a simple usb pendrive. Or, if you care about reliability, an endurance sdcard with an usb adapter.
Has its merits, of course.
 
tmnr1992

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ber71 said:
Interesting.
However, I can't see any real advantages. This setup is way complicated vs a simple usb pendrive. Or, if you care about reliability, an endurance sdcard with an usb adapter.
Has its merits, of course.
Click to expand...
It does seem more complicated to set up, but I think it just makes things more convenient in the long run. I have a 2 hdd setup, and with this I could just use my Wii U hdd for something else while keeping my Wii/Gamecube hdd plugged in, freeing up the front usb ports to connect a controller adapter like Mayflash, Raphnet or the Gamecube controller adapter.
 
fvig2001

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Too bad high endurance cards only go up to 256gb. I guess this would be cute if you have a small sample of games.

Will this work if you also use emunand?
 
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fvig2001 said:
Too bad high endurance cards only go up to 256gb. I guess this would be cute if you have a small sample of games.
Click to expand...
The Sandisk High Endurance go up to 512GB. Or you take your chance with a non endurance one. It would be probably fine too.

fvig2001 said:
Will this work if you also use emunand?
Click to expand...
You mean redNAND? This in fact can mount the redNAND MLC partition as USB on your sysNAND.
And redNAND also as an option built in to mount the system MLC as USB on the redNAND
 
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tmnr1992

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fvig2001 said:
Too bad high endurance cards only go up to 256gb. I guess this would be cute if you have a small sample of games.

Will this work if you also use emunand?
Click to expand...
I have like 40 games and I'm using around 180gb if I'm not mistaken, 256gb should be plenty.
 
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So let me get this strait. We need to insall an additional hack ontop of Aroma, this ISFShax? I thought that was a hack that was mostly used to unbrick some machines and was mostly for, wii U techs for lack of a better term. We couldn't use this plugin with just vanilla Aroma?
 
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CheatFreak47

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This is really cool, and frankly as SD sizes continue to balloon in size and drop in price, this or a similar setup with ISFSHax and RedNAND (especially for at-risk hynix nand chips) may end up being the end-all-be-all method for running Wii U games eventually.

It would certainly a lot less annoying then dealing with hard drives and Y-cables.
 
lordelan

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Wow, this is an unexpected release and by far one of the most interesting and impressive things that happened to the Wii U lately.

As a "hoarder" this is not for me as even the max allowed 2 TB for the Wii U drive are too limited for my preferences but I've been asked a few times by friends whether Wii U games can be launched from an SD card so there'd be no need for an external drive.

My usual answer was obviously "Yeah, you could use Loadiine but honestly, just don't do it. It sucks." and now I can just redirect them to this awesome piece of software.

Also given the fact that Wii and GameCube games as well as roms for RetroArch can be launched from an SD card as well, this theoretically allows for a complete drive-less setup with all sorts of games across all systems if you're fine with only a few curated games for each.

So thanks for the work to achieve this! =)
I can see myself setting this up for a few friends in the future.

fvig2001 said:
Will this work if you also use emunand?
Click to expand...
4d1xlaan said:
how does this compare with rednand?
Click to expand...
Out of pure curiosity: Why are people using an emuNAND/redNAND on the Wii U where you won't get banned even if you played online (which isn't possible without Pretendo now anyways)?
Only as an additional layer of protection to not brick the system?
On the Nintendo Switch, it's a no-brainer but I don't understand why people would do this on a 3DS or Wii U. :unsure:
 
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V10lator said:
Cause the internal NAND got damaged and they don't want to solder.
Click to expand...
I see, thanks. :)

@SDIO Is there any chance to also achieve this as part of the vWii HDD?
If we could have a big HDD with a FAT32 partition for homebrew and vWii stuff and another primary NTFS partition (of up to 2 TB) that then can be used to be formatted into the Wii U format, that'd be great.
 
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ber71 said:
Interesting.
However, I can't see any real advantages. This setup is way complicated vs a simple usb pendrive. Or, if you care about reliability, an endurance sdcard with an usb adapter.
Has its merits, of course.
Click to expand...
Advantage for me is instead of 2 USB drives that I have to physically switch out for my Wii U games and for all my Wii and Wiiware games, I can just keep the vWii drive connected at all times and with all my Wii U games being loaded on the second partition of my SD card. Hell, now I can migrate all of my emulator and Nintendont games from my SD card to the vWii drive that still has plenty of space, freeing up space for Wii U games on the SD card.
 
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The Real Jdbye

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Very useful. But isn't it going to wear out the SD card quickly? The Wii U supposedly hammers USB drives with writes constantly. The main reason USB flash drives aren't recommended isn't because they're unreliable (although they certainly are), limited number of write cycles is an inherent flaw of flash storage and that is just as true for SD cards.
Post automatically merged:

lordelan said:
I see, thanks. :)

@SDIO Is there any chance to also achieve this as part of the vWii HDD?
If we could have a big HDD with a FAT32 partition for homebrew and vWii stuff and another primary NTFS partition (of up to 2 TB) that then can be used to be formatted into the Wii U format, that'd be great.
Click to expand...
I would be interested in this. I probably wouldn't use a USB HDD (they're slower than SD cards), but external SSDs are pretty cheap, and the speed advantage can't be overlooked.
I think it's probably more difficult to do it with USB, because the Wii U wants complete control over any USB drive it sees, but normally ignores the SD card (in Wii U mode)
To take away its stranglehold over USB drives, we first need to patch out the existing USB drive detection (so it won't ask to format anything inserted that is not what the Wii U expects) and r/w routines, only to then reimplement all of it to work with drives that are partitioned differently. Patching out those checks would generally be a good idea anyways, so uStealth will no longer be required for vWii drives. (Does Tiramisu or Aroma already do something like this? I haven't tried them yet)
In my opinion, that would be the holy grail. Being able to play everything off of a single, cheap, fast and reliable drive. Which you could already do with SDUSB, but SD cards are only marginally more reliable than flash drives in my experience, and the r/w speed on the Wii U's SD reader is not that good, so it's not the ideal solution, but certainly way better than needing 2 USB HDDs.
 
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