Topic: What If the Wii had an External Hard Drive?

[ejamer]

Although unsure if SD card transfer speeds are really fast enough, I would much rather just use cheap and easily available (ie: non-proprietary) SD cards for my external storage whenever possible.  It does seem to work very well for the WiiWare/Virtual Console/DLC content currently available.
 
As for having a Wii with a Hard Drive, I don't really see any benefits as things stand right now.  It makes more sense for the next system with some different design chioces being made right out of the gate.

[Pale]

Sony really has the best system in place for all this stuff.  OEM laptop hard drives that can be swapped in and out. Rights management that involves just putting your account on the PS3.  Allowing any one account to live on up to five PS3s concurrently.

It's the perfect compromise in my opinion.  They still protect their content from massive sharing, but don't control it so much it hurts the user experience.

[ejamer]

Sony really has the best system in place for all this stuff. ...

Agreed - especially because they had it planned this way from Day 1.  It would be nice to see something similar emulated (ie: blatantly copied) by other consoles in the future.

[that Baby guy]

I definitely wish I could move gamesaves, VC titles, and Wii-ware with me very easily.  Essentially, it's possible with homebrew, but both consoles need to have gone through extensive set-up procedures to handle that.  My Wii is installed upstairs, in my room, while my roommate has a Wii installed downstairs.  It's sad that the easiest way to play my games, saves, and things like that is to disconnect my Wii and take it downstairs, opposed to just transferring things on an SD card.

[Stratos]

I definitely wish I could move gamesaves, VC titles, and Wii-ware with me very easily.  Essentially, it's possible with homebrew, but both consoles need to have gone through extensive set-up procedures to handle that.  My Wii is installed upstairs, in my room, while my roommate has a Wii installed downstairs.  It's sad that the easiest way to play my games, saves, and things like that is to disconnect my Wii and take it downstairs, opposed to just transferring things on an SD card.

I would still carry my Wii because I'd either be to lazy to copy it all from my Wii to the SD card to the other Wii and back again when I was done playing or it would be too easy to forget to transfer it and then start playing with old save data and end up with two unique saves.

[BranDonk Kong]

The Wii doesn't have to update the firmware to allow DLC to be loaded directly from the SD card, they just have to let devs do this with their software. You can already run stuff directly from the SD in homebrew, no need for a firmware upgrade.