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Wii U owners - what USB storage are you using?

O

orborborb

Member
32gb internal + 64gb Sandisk Extreme USB stick, buy most games digitally and never had any issues. And I bet I'll have enough space for Splatoon and Zelda and Star Fox in addition to Mario/Luigi U, Nintendoland, 3D World, Pikmin, Smash, Kart, Toad, Tropical Freeze, and a ton of virtual console games.
 
P

Pandy

Member
Starwolf_UK said:
The Wii U has four USB ports. Two on front, two on back. My setup is two front for U cable, one back for LAN and second back for Gamecube adapter (boo hoo no rumble).


There is a button combo you can press to turn off auto-sleep on hard drives.

Thanks Nintendo.
Click to expand...
Holy cow! Good knowledge. Thanks Nintendo indeed!
(I was planning the PS4 drive upgrade anyway, and already had the caddy, so I'm not out anything except a few boring minutes of cumulative shutdown/restart time. If I'd bought a new HDD to replace it then I'd be pretty angry about that option being hidden.)

I'm tempted to put the 2TB drive on to check that was the issue, but I've been using the PS4 one for a year now with no problems, so I'll stick with that for the time being. Nice to have the option though, in case there are issues with the Xenoblade X data packs.

Cheers.
 
S

Steve Youngblood

Member
I have a Convio 1 TB external. I was using a Y-cable, but now I'm just using the included cable and plugging it into a powered 4 port hub. Needed the hub anyway since I have a GC adapter, an ethernet adapter, and an external hard drive. Works well. I would have intermittent power losses to the hard drive with the Y-cable, but I've had no issues since ditching the Y-cable and using the included USB cable. Obviously, that's not supposed to work correctly plugged into one of the Wii U's onboard USB ports.
 
HUELEN10

HUELEN10

Member
Steve Youngblood said:
I have a Convio 1 TB external. I was using a Y-cable, but now I'm just using the included cable and plugging it into a powered 4 port hub. Needed the hub anyway since I have a GC adapter, an ethernet adapter, and an external hard drive. Works well. I would have intermittent power losses to the hard drive with the Y-cable, but I've had no issues since ditching the Y-cable and using the included USB cable. Obviously, that's not supposed to work correctly plugged into one of the Wii U's onboard USB ports.
Click to expand...
But Steve, did you make sure the hub has an auto-off function to turn off power on the Hun when the host device is powered off? If not, you are just letting that self-powered disk run at all hours!
 
Z

Zeyphersan

Banned
HUELEN10 said:
Not enough power for all sticks, and it is not officially supported; more than a few here have lost everything by going against Nintendo's flash stick warning.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but I'm only going to have one, MAYBE two games on there. Setting up a 500GB HDD seems like a massive waste
 
D

Dicer

Banned
3aueHRG.jpg
Click to expand...

WD 1TB powered drive...
 
R

Rootbeer

Banned
spindashing said:
Yeah, same deal for me. My old PS3 started acting up so I stole the HDD I bought for it and bought an enclosure that ended up coming with a y-cable of it's own.

Slapped the old 20gb HDD that I saved back onto the PS3 so it's essentially my PS2 for now.
Click to expand...
The 80GB drive was basically trash until I decided to use it for my Wii U. Can't complain really. :)

Since the Wii U will let you hook two drives to it (2nd drive is for transfer only), I'll use the 80gb and if I ever outgrow it I'll buy the most cost-effective WD drive I can find and upgrade to that.

Since I'm disk-only except for DLC, update data, club nintendo redemptions and digital-only games... I think 80GB will get me quite far.
 
Dr. Zoidberg

Dr. Zoidberg

Member
HUELEN10 said:
did you make sure the hub has an auto-off function to turn off power on the Hun when the host device is powered off? If not, you are just letting that self-powered disk run at all hours!
Click to expand...

I tried to use a powered-hub with the Wii U and a Y cable as well and noticed that my external drive never spun down even when the system was off. That annoyed me so I scrapped that plan.
 
D

DiddysKongQuest

Member
Barristan Selmy said:
I cracked open an oooold laptop and bought a casing for it. It's only 100gb but I don't game much on my Wii U( my children's console so far) and most of the stuff is physical. I've only download MK8.

Edit: I've been using since about MK8 launch and while it does disconnect sometimes for no reason it could be the casing or the kids touching and moving it around a bunch. Other than that, I've have no problems.
Click to expand...

That's what I did today after people warned me about using an USB Stick. Todays big Smash 4 update and the upcoming second Mario Kart 8 DLC are just too much for a Wii U basic if you have a couple of savegames and updates on it.
 
R

Rebel Leader

THE POWER OF BUTTERSCOTCH BOTTOMS
For those with external hd without the y cable how do you make sure the hdd is off Or does it turn off with the wiivu?
 
R

Rebel Leader

THE POWER OF BUTTERSCOTCH BOTTOMS
Sorry phone is fucked up
Im taking about a powered hdd.
when I turn the Wii u off do I have to manually switch the hdd?
 
R

RootCause

Member
Rebel Leader said:
Sorry phone is fucked up
Im taking about a powered hdd.
when I turn the Wii u off do I have to manually switch the hdd?
Click to expand...
It depends on the hdd your using. Mine has its own power supply(connected to wall outlet) but it turns on/off when the wiiu is powered on/off. Pretty neat, don't have to turn it off manually.
 
J

Japanmanx3

Member
I use a 2TB western digital that's has its on power adapter. Had to reformat it to be NTFS instead of the mac configuration or had at first and it was just plug and transfer. Works great!
 
W

Wowfunhappy

Member
RootCause said:
Some games are digital only, plus game installs, patches, and dlc can be stored on the external drive. ;)
Click to expand...

Mhm. If you have a 32gb system though it's still possible to avoid an external hard drive by buying retail whenever possible. eShop-exclusives are generally small.
 
D

DownGrader

Member
So it seems like my problem from the OT was with the hard drive, which was actually slowly dying (seems like Wii U file system is more sensitive than he NTFS or FAT32). I found fresh new Samsung 500 GB 2.5" SATA drive, as well as new USB enclosure with Y-cable for some reason. I also disabled sleep mode in on the hidden dialog box in Wii U data management

Works like a charm! I tested it with Virtual Console, YouTube, uPlay and PIKMIN Short Movies HD; the only problem I've found ws a single image tearing in Pikmin movies. I managed to reproduce it, but only once, so it seems like everything is OK. The hard drive automatically turns on when the Wii U is checking for updates in sleep mode, by the way.

Still miss my Brain Training. Hope it will be added the eShop for purchase so I can redownload it.
 
T

TunaLover

Member
HUELEN10 said:
But Steve, did you make sure the hub has an auto-off function to turn off power on the Hun when the host device is powered off? If not, you are just letting that self-powered disk run at all hours!
Click to expand...
You always can connect the data cable to Wii U, and the power cable to the hub, it will not spin until Wii U is on.
 
D

delaneya

Member
I am using a Toshiba HDWC120EW3J1 Canvio.

One thing I noticed is, if you download a game it should install by default on your new drive. Unless you have a save file on the wii u internal drive it will then install on the wiiu. It took me a while to workout why pikmin 3 would not download on the new drive.
 
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