Hardware Multi HDD for the wiiu

[ferjero989]

hello!
my wiiu works great for the wiiu games (500gb hdd)
and i have a 2tb drive for the wii filled with gamecube and wii games (fat32/ntfs)
is it possible to have either both on the wiiu or one big drive with wii, gc and wiiu games?

i tried using a hub on the wiiu.. it will get stuck reading.
the wii usb is a desktop drive (powered) and the wiiu drive is a portable with splitter for power.

 

[ferjero989]

im also looking at this thread.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/the-ult...-1-device-by-eipok-mar18.497994/#post-7860554

i wonder if anyone tested this with USB sticks

 

[AmandaRose]

This lets you have two HDDs pluged in at the same time. Put your wii hdd in the baxk usb ports and put the WiiU one in the front usb ports.

https://gbatemp.net/threads/ustealth-wii-u-format-disk-nag-workaround.352786/

Or else there is this

https://gbatemp.net/threads/the-ult...endo-games-in-1-device-by-eipok-mar18.497994/

 

[ferjero989]

https://gbatemp.net/threads/the-ult...endo-games-in-1-device-by-eipok-mar18.497994/[/URL]

about this one, i wonder if anyone was able to do it with USB flash drives? (im thinking sandisk fit drives (256 and 512gb)
those card readers seem bulky. if im going to eliminate drives.. i better do it completely

 

[V10lator]

As others said you can either use UStealth to use both drives at the same time or transorm the Wii and GC games into VC injects and install them just like Wii U games, eliminating one drive.

USB Sticks are generally not advised cause they (esp. cheap ones) tend to have bad wear leveling algos while the Wii U overwrites the same data blocks again and again, resulting in fast dying NAND cells in the stick.

 

[Jayinem81]

Why would you be trying to switch from external hard drive (good) to flash drive (bad) Trust me from experience flash drives do work but they do not work forever. I had several die on me within a year then all your games are gone, because flash drives are not made to play intense video games they are made for simple things like a document. External hard drives can handle the games and will last

 

[AmandaRose]

To elaborate on what @Jayinem81 is saying hard drives are designed to be constantly written to and read from. A flash drive is designed to be constantly read from but only occasionally written to. WiiU games especially Breath of the Wild constantly write data to the HDD as you are playing. Using a flash drive on the WiiU will greatly decrease its lifespan.

 

[V10lator]

I had several die on me within a year

That's exactly what I mentioned above: The NAND cells will die quickly as the Wii U overwrites the same blocks (savefiles, metadata, ...) again and again. You need good wear leveling*¹ algos to counterfight that but USB sticks tend to have crappy FTLs*². SSDs are a bit better here but there are still a lot of users reporting fast dying SSDs when used with the Wii U. So one would need a expensive enterprise SSD and that's just a waste of money, esp if a HDD already exists and gets the job done just fine.

because flash drives are not made to play intense video games they are made for simple things like a document.

We wouldn't use SSDs if that would be true. It's really just about the wear leveling algos in the FTL.

*¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling
*² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory_controller#Flash_translation_layer_(FTL)_and_mapping

//EDIT: Forgot one thing: USB sticks and SSDs also have backup NAND cells. When one cell dies the FTL replaces it with a backup cell. The problem here is that USB drives and cheap SSDs don't have that many backup cells...

//EDIT²: I just remembered when I messed with UBIFS - a filesystem designed to run on raw NAND / no FTL. From that some fun fact: The data on your USB sticks and SSDs corrupts continuous. Every time you access the storage it corrupts:

NAND flashes have a so called "read-disturb" property, which means that a NAND page read operation may introduce a persistent bit change, not necessarily located in the page being read; the ECC code would fix it, but more read operations may introduce more bit changes and correctable ECC errors may turn into uncorrectable ECC errors

"Read-disturb" errors can also occur on a page other that the one being read, but which is within the same eraseblock

NAND flashes also have a "program-disturb" property, which means that if you program a NAND page, you may introduce a bit-flip in a different NAND page. The bit change can be fixed by ECC, but with time the changes may accumulate and become unfixable

MLC NAND pages are coupled in a sense that if you cut power while writing to a page, you corrupt not only this page, but also one of the previous pages which is paired with the current one. For example, pages 0 and 3, 1 and 4, 2 and 5, 3 and 6 in and so on (in the same eraseblock) may be paired (page distance is 4, but there may be other distances). So if you write data to, say, page 3 and cut the power, you may end up with corrupted data in page 0

(Source: http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubifs.html )