Topic: Wii U USB Storage Detailed

[the_dan_x]

Find out everything you need to know about Wii U USB and Wii U internal storage.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/32473

Nintendo revealed details about Wii U USB storage solutions in a Nintendo Direct this evening in Japan.

With the initial Wii U launch firmware, gamers will only be able to use one USB hard drive with a capacity up to 2 TB. Data can be stored and games can be run off of this device. Even if the device is larger than 2 TB, the Wii U will only be able to make use of 2 TB of storage. Once formatted for the Wii U, the hard drive will no longer be able to be used on other devices such as PCs or other gaming consoles.

For those using hard drive without dedicated power sources, a USB Y cable is recommended, which connects allows the device to be powered using two USB ports. Nintendo recommends that gamers do not use these kind of hard drives or USB flash drives due to limitations on data read speed.

At launch, only one USB hard drive will be supported, but at some point in the future, support for two hard drives will be added. This will allow for simple transfers of data between two connected drives.

In the Nintendo Direct, Satoru Iwata also clarified the exact amount of storage space that will be available in the different Wii U units. All Wii U systems will use approximately 4.2 GB for things such as account information and firmware. The 8 GB Wii U Basic set actually has 7.2 GB available for storage while the 32 GB Premium Set has 29 GB. When the required 4.2 GB is taken into consideration, the Basic Set only offers 3 GB of storage while the Premium Set has 24.8 GB available. You can watch the latest Nintendo Direct in its entirety below.

[coffeewithgames]

LOL....they are doing a horrible job of selling the Wii U. I seriously think the investors are going to get together when the profits miss again, and people are going to start getting fired.

[Ceric]

So effectively you have to buy a harddrive if you want to digital in almost the most casual way.  Just bought a Hardrive yesterday for a good price & now Nintendo says I shouldn't use it.  If Nintendo cared about speed then why didn't they spring for USB 3.  That's just low Nintendo.

[Caliban]

Damn, I was hoping I could use my current external hard drive. Guess I will have to buy another one eventually.

[regin]

I honestly expected them to say that you have to move the games from the hard drive to the internal storage to be able to play them. I guess they actually did learn something from Wii.

[Adrock]

Ehh... There are a lot of restrictions for something that was meant to be the simpler choice. The SD card thing confuses me more.

At this point, I feel like it would have been easier if 8GB of flash memory was standard in both sets, but the Deluxe set came with an additional (and replacable) regular 250GB hard drive. Would a 7400 RPM hard drive get too hot?

[Ian Sane]

I figure it's to combat piracy but having to dedicate the hard drive specifically to the Wii U is kind of expensive.  I have an external USB hard drive and it's not even near full from my PC usage so having it do double duty would be really convenient.

Gotta love how Nintendo is still revealing important details like this mere DAYS from launch.

[Oblivion]

3 GB... LOL! Talk about false advertising. Also, does the hard drive have to be in FAT32?


And since I just bought a $150 desktop hard drive over a month ago, will I still be able to create a partition in the HD so I can use it for other **** too?

[UncleBob]

All Wii U systems will use approximately 4.2 GB for things such as account information and firmware. The 8 GB Wii U Basic set actually has 7.2 GB available for storage while the 32 GB Premium Set has 29 GB. When the required 4.2 GB is taken into consideration, the Basic Set only offers 3 GB of storage while the Premium Set has 24.8 GB available.

Wow.  That's a kick in the balls.  This, alone, should be headline news.

[TJ Spyke]

3 GB... LOL! Talk about false advertising. Also, does the hard drive have to be in FAT32?


And since I just bought a $150 desktop hard drive over a month ago, will I still be able to create a partition in the HD so I can use it for other **** too?

How is it false advertising? EVERY device that has storage has less than the advertised amount. For example, I have a 16 GB iPad but only 13.83 GB are actually available to me.

[stevey]

Once formatted for the Wii U, the hard drive will no longer be able to be used on other devices such as PCs or other gaming consoles.

The ****? Nintendo better support formatting selectable partitions in the hard drive, there's no reason to waste a whole drive for the WiiU other than lazy/idiot coding.

[Oblivion]

3 GB... LOL! Talk about false advertising. Also, does the hard drive have to be in FAT32?


And since I just bought a $150 desktop hard drive over a month ago, will I still be able to create a partition in the HD so I can use it for other **** too?

How is it false advertising? EVERY device that has storage has less than the advertised amount. For example, I have a 16 GB iPad but only 13.83 GB are actually available to me.

I know that, I'm not a fucking retard. My iPod Touch is "techinically" an 8GB one, but I can only use like 6.9 GB of it. But 3 GB?! Come on, you KNOW that is utter bulltshit.

[Ian Sane]

3 GB is like, what, one game?  A single DVD can hold more than that.  That small amount is probably going to cost Nintendo some third party download-only titles.

[TJ Spyke]

I don't think so Ian, it hasn't stopped the Xbox 360 from getting any digital games and it launched with a version that had no hard drive or internal memory. There are already digital games confirmed for Wii U that are larger than 3GB.

[MrPhishfood]

Pretty much what I expected. I thought it would be unlikely that Wii U games would be stored on FAT32 or NTSC file systems.

USB 3.0 isn't such a big deal, the Wii U disc drive has a 22.5MB/sec read speed so USB 2.0 should be suffice to match it.

[NWR_insanolord]

I don't think so Ian, it hasn't stopped the Xbox 360 from getting any digital games and it launched with a version that had no hard drive or internal memory. There are already digital games confirmed for Wii U that are larger than 3GB.

Isn't the low end 360 right now still only 4 GB? Support for the download platforms will depend on how Nintendo treats developers, what kinds of restrictions there are, and how things sell, so while the low space may hurt sales a bit, I'd imagine most people who would buy a lot of download games are the kind of people who'd buy the Pro system and/or not have a problem adding more storage via USB.

[Ceric]

Pretty much what I expected. I thought it would be unlikely that Wii U games would be stored on FAT32 or NTSC file systems.

USB 3.0 isn't such a big deal, the Wii U disc drive has a 22.5MB/sec read speed so USB 2.0 should be suffice to match it.

Agree and even a 5400RPM harddrive should be able to pull that off.  But Nintendo specifically sights speed so yeah why no USB3 then.

[MrPhishfood]

Agree and even a 5400RPM harddrive should be able to pull that off.  But Nintendo specifically sights speed so yeah why no USB3 then.

They said speed but not how much. If they wanted to go really really fast they would have had USB 3.0 and said "we recommend you use solid state drives" or if they wanted to go super mega fast then they would have allowed you to use those PCI-Express solid state drives.

Their engineers likely felt USB 2.0 is enough for what the system is capable of.

[Adrock]

I don't really feel like dealing with the external hard drive restrictions so I hope the 25GB left in the Deluxe Set will hold me over the whole generation. It's looking like I'll be buying some eshop games, but I most likely won't get DLC and I definitely won't download whole retail games. If I got one as a freebie (like PSN hacking freebies), that would be a different story...

[ThePerm]

Once formatted for the Wii U, the hard drive will no longer be able to be used on other devices such as PCs or other gaming consoles.

The ****? Nintendo better support formatting selectable partitions in the hard drive, there's no reason to waste a whole drive for the WiiU other than lazy/idiot coding.

Agreed with entirely.

the advantage of being able to use an HDD is that people have them laying around. If people have to buy a whole new HDD then theres no advantage, and really that makes the Wii U $100 more expensive then advertised.

one way to combat the space issues would be to store some data on the flash memory and more on the hard drive. So the loader program on the flash drive, and then things like textures and levels on the hard drive. The Wii u has some decent memory, and most the stuff can just be loaded once and then be used for a long while.

[Fjurbanski]

Yeah, this would make me mad if I hadn't already resigned myself to the fact that I'm gonna have to buy an HDD for this system a long time ago.


Hell, it's been 100% clear to all of us for a long time that an external HDD was practically a necessity.


So they can do whatever they want with their internal memory as far as I care.

[Kairon]

I've already been planning to buy my VERY FIRST external HDD for this, so this changes little if anything for me. Though I have to say, that large amount of storage space used by the Wii U out of the box is a bit surprising, and rather prohibitive for Basic Console owners. Yikes!

[ei8htbit]

@CoffeeWithGames
You're right, they are not doing themselves any favours selling this thing by running around frantically trying to plug holes in the information boat while it's sinking..

Maybe it's just because the social space has advanced so much and we've all been trained on how console launches are supposed to happen over the past 10 years, but the sporadic and often unnannounced Nintendo Direct onslaught in the past 2 weeks leading up to ground zero seem to illustrate that Nintendo themselves barely know what the hell they are going to do with this thing.
It's almost like they spent all their time worried about how this gamepad and MiiVerse would be integrated into the experience (which is kind of important of course) but neglected to fully think through the basic console 101 stuff now that they have a proper big boy console on their hands. This memory expansion stuff is a total mess at the moment and I think it will come off to the average person as very intimidating or confusing. Moms understand USB thumb drives and SD cards because they use them with cameras and the old computer all the time. But now there's diagrams with random HardDrives with "Y cables" but they should get one that has a separate power supply but make sure you get one that's big enough but not more than 2TB or else it will explode and they can't use the SD card for WiiU storage but that's okay for Wii stuff and the Wii games they downloaded require a separate mode - Why the hell is it so convoluted?

I do understand why there is such frantic protection over how they allow storage to be used due to piracy, but there is absolutely no mystery in how to solve it; online authentication. They're basically already telling everyone that the WiiU is nothing without an Internet connection, why not take it the full step further, allow people to use whatever the hell kind of storage they want without limits, but if they want to run any kind of game the system requires online authentication similar to Steam that is linked to your Nintendo ID and logged. Heck, you could even bring your digital games with you to your friends house (or re-download them there so long as you log in and authenticate).

Of course everyone would be crying over that too because they don't have Internet, and what if the internet is down, etc. but at least it makes things a lot more simple for every non-pirate who just wants to enjoy the thing without having to go through all these ridiculous hoops. You can bet your ass that Microsoft and Sony are looking to that type of model for their next machine.

[Phantom7300]

If I've done my research correctly, anyone who has an external HDD just  needs to pick up a y-usb cable to connect to it.  The cable simply increases the power to the HDD and allows for smoother and faster data transfer.  It should work on 2.5" drives, 3.5" may need an external power source though.

[Stogi]

Despite the claims for the opposite, this launch (other than the games) is looking a little rushed.

There are a few arbitrary hoops to jump through simply to buy and play online.