Wii U and external HDD

[Furealz]

i just got a Seagate GoFlex 1.5 TB Hard Drive for Wii U! How long should it last me, and is USB 2.0 enough?

[J0RdAnN]

1.5 TB should last you the entire system life unless you download every single game ever released on the eShop. and 2.0 is what the Wii U has so you are good!

[FighterKirby]

Oh god, Seagate. I've only heard bad things about them. I bought a 3 TB hard drive made by them and it lasted me only a few months before shutting down on me entirely. Something about the battery attached to the hard drive not working, or not getting enough power? I bought another battery (I guess it's more of an adapter, I suppose?) for $20 online and it pretty much put me back at square one. I have a TB of data (I dumped like, everything from my computer (Videos I've recorded taking up a majority of that space) on there) used up and now I can't have it anymore. It still exists on the hard drive, but I can't TURN ON the hard drive and plug it into my computer. It's awful. I don't know if I looked hard enough when searching for a better solution, but I was basically told there's no easy way to solve it.

Really, the fact that it broke on me in the first place is really disappointing. I hope yours lasts.

[cobaltorange]

Seagate never failed me!

[KingBroly]

Ever Seagate Hard Drive I've ever had died out on me within 12 months. Western Digital all the way.

[Kama]

I have 2 Seagate drives that have both worked fine for me. I have a third already that i'll be using for Wii U.

[Furealz]

Thanks for the help. I've been a bit worried since I bough such a cheap Hard Drive, and I really wish it will last for years. Some of you think Seagate is a good way to go, but I've heard a lot of bad reviews . I sincerely hope that my Launch Wii U will handle it for a long time . Although, my Hard Drive has a guaranteed two-year warranty I shouldn;t have to worry about it's unreliability rite?

[ManoTikiTia]

I'm planning on getting at least 1.0 TB and know they're always on sale and can be cheap but I want something that's going to last. So what are you guys getting or what should I be getting? And also, does it need to be 2.0 or 3?

[ddddd]

Whatever you choose, it has to be 2.0, BTW, that is still faster than the disk drive itself.

[Omegavertebra]

It can be either USB 2.0 or 3.0. 3.0 is backwards compatible with 2.0 ports so it doesn't matter one bit. This is also a question I'd also like to know the answer too. A thin black external drive would be perfect for my model, so any suggestions for me (but mainly the OP) would be perfect.

[Popple]

I've always been a fan of Seagate drives. Amazon usually goes pretty crazy with deals around this time of year (Black Friday 'Week'/holidays and such) so you should have no trouble finding any good deals. Here's one that I found that's pretty cheap already.

[ManoTikiTia]

I think that's the one I'm going to get. I love that the price varies per color

[Furealz]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DACtNK0OQF4 This is my HDD unboxing for my Wii U

[tekshow]

I have a 2.0 TB drive I want to use for the Wii U. I just allocated 500 gigs of it solely for the U, but I want to know what file system im supposed to use? NTFS I hope? PS3 forces you into Fat32, so I'm not sure which to pick.

Did Rawmeat answer this in the podcast? I might have missed it?

[Omegavertebra]

I can only assume it's FAT32, because the SD Card format is FAT32 for Wii U.

[tekshow]

grumble grumble.

Well I have the partition set aside for it so I guess if I need to use a 3rd party tool I will.

[Serpent_Seed]

Do you have to set up partitions for a portable hard drive if your using it for a console? I was hoping it would be like an SD card where it would just make a folder for the Wii U. I should have known what a hard drive meant. Well do make the partitions when attached to Wii U or to a computer?

[gtt]

assuming the wiiu doesn't format it with a nintendo format, I'd hope it use NTFS.

[ManoTikiTia]

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Po ... hard+drive

1TB should last me a long time but I'm wondering if this will be comparable? Anyone else getting or using this one. It's a great price.

[gtt]

update, make sure you get one that has a separate power adapter, as the wiiu usb ports aren't powered. because nintendo apparently wants to make sure everyone knows how pants on head stupid they are for not having a hdd in the system.

[KingBroly]

update, make sure you get one that has a separate power adapter, as the wiiu usb ports aren't powered. because nintendo apparently wants to make sure everyone knows how pants on head stupid they are for not having a hdd in the system.

First, I think you're the one with the pants on their head here.

Second, you need either:
A - an external HDD with a y type cable (2-usb plugs) to ensure that it works if it doesn't have a power adapter. Otherwise they don't guarantee the transfer process will work.
B - an external HDD with 1 usb plug will work if it does have a power adapter.

They're not saying they won't work, they're just saying they may not. You need to read before making posts like this. And if you don't have B, just buy a y type cable. Done. Simple.

[Eternal Rain]

I'm a bit curious about this all well. Now I currently don't plan on buying any retail games digitally. I typically only do that in special situations on my Xbox 360, like I downloaded Bayonetta because the game is surprisingly rare to come by in boxed form in my area, or Transformers: War for Cybertron being on sale for $20 less than the current GameStop price. Otherwise I try to stick to stick to discs that come in boxes and leave the digital games to my PC through stuff like Steam and Origin.

Anyway, for now I feel that the 29 GB of memory (at least 3 GB is gonna be used up by the system, not a surprise considering the 360 did the same thing) will be fine for stuff like eShop games for a good while, but I do feel that I'll need to get an external drive at some point. SD Cards will only be good for the stuff I transfer over from my original Wii system, like all my VC and Wiiware games (though I can only transfer VC right now, Wiiware couldn't be stored on my Wii's main memory because it got full up on the VC games alone, which leaves me really hoping my purchase/license stuff from the Wii Shop Channel is transferred over so I can always just re-download stuff like all 5 Monkey Island episodes later).

I highly doubt I'll ever need something as large as a 2 or even 1 TB sized hard drive, since I don't think I'm ever gonna get close to downloading THAT much stuff in the system's lifetime, but I do think that maybe 100 GB will do me fine for now. Anyone know of any good ones with that memory size, and are affordable?

[gtt]

update, make sure you get one that has a separate power adapter, as the wiiu usb ports aren't powered. because nintendo apparently wants to make sure everyone knows how pants on head stupid they are for not having a hdd in the system.

First, I think you're the one with the pants on their head here.

Second, you need either:
A - an external HDD with a y type cable (2-usb plugs) to ensure that it works if it doesn't have a power adapter. Otherwise they don't guarantee the transfer process will work.
B - an external HDD with 1 usb plug will work if it does have a power adapter.

They're not saying they won't work, they're just saying they may not. You need to read before making posts like this. And if you don't have B, just buy a y type cable. Done. Simple.

and that's dumb. No reason to have non-powered usb ports. when they were pimping their "interal storage doesn't matter, you can expand!" so now, I have to either take up another power socket (making the total 3, btw), or use a USB Y cable which is just... backwards. There is no good reason to not power the USB ports.

It's just.... archaic.

[ShiftyCat]

Nintendo should honestly make their own brand of HDD to sell so there's no confusion among consumers. I can figure it out but a lot of people might not.

[kevynwight]

The 32 GB drive is actually only 29 GB when you get past the fact that you have to divide 32,000,000,000 by 1.024 three times, and then account for file system overhead. On top of that, the initial install of Wii U OS and patches (Miiverse, videochat, Wii BC, etc.) takes up 4.2 GB. That leaves 24.8 GB.

Anyway, I have my eye on this at Amazon: U32 Shadow™ 500GB External USB 3.0 Mini 2.5" Portable Hard Drive

$77 for the black. It's not externally powered but it does feature a dual USB cable by default (see scale below). It's not 1 TB but it's good enough.

The Wii U's USB 2.0 ports are powered, you just use single-cable drives at your own peril.

Scale of USB drive reliability / compatibility:
externally powered = 3
dual USB cables = 2
single USB cable = 1
USB flash drive = 0