External harddisk for the Wii?

[Jabba]

It it possible to save all your Wii-data down to a external harddisk through the USB-slot?

 

[D Twizzle]

Nope, SD cards do all that.

 

[Jabba]

But stuff like VC's?

 

[NateTheGreat]

Nope, SD cards do all that.

Um, sorry, but you don't know that for sure. I'm guessing you won't be able to save directly to an external hard drive or flash drive, but you probably will be able to copy game saves to a hard drive from Wii's internal 512MB of storage space and copy videos and music from a hard drive to Wii's internal storage.

 

[ghghgh14702]

It was told in an interview quite a while back with a Nintendo rep that the usb port would be used for external components such as a usb hard drive, and they did not elaborate any farther, so usb hard drive should be supported since that was their example, whether its Nintendo exclusive hard drives or any brand that can use a generic driver is the question.

 

[Jabba]

But it would kinda ruin the idea of buying a 60$ Nintendo 2GB SD card when you can get 250GB for about 100$ (If it's cheap)!

 

[Equis]

im sure u will be able to connect one of this

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage...rp=15&sp=&qp=&list=n&iht=y&usc=All+Categories

or it would be NICE!

 

[Jabba]

It's nice, but then no-one would buy the 2GB SD-card..

 

[ghghgh14702]

people would still buy the SD cards as you can use they on more than just the Wii, I have a digital camcorder, camera, MP3 player, flash disk for PC that all use SD cards as expansion, they are also much faster than a USB hard drive, or normal hard drive for that matter and they do not degrade in quality over time like normal drives, would also be internal so you don't have another piece of equipment to lug around. If you goto your friends house it would also be easier to just bring an SD card than a usb drive also. I believe both options will be available, maybe not usb drive support right off but even if Nintendo doesn't make drivers someone will, either third party or a mod-dev team.

 

[opstand]

people would still buy the SD cards as you can use they on more than just the Wii, I have a digital camcorder, camera, MP3 player, flash disk for PC that all use SD cards as expansion, they are also much faster than a USB hard drive, or normal hard drive for that matter and they do not degrade in quality over time like normal drives, would also be internal so you don't have another piece of equipment to lug around. If you goto your friends house it would also be easier to just bring an SD card than a usb drive also. I believe both options will be available, maybe not usb drive support right off but even if Nintendo doesn't make drivers someone will, either third party or a mod-dev team.

Not sure what you mean by a normal hard drive degrading in quality over time. That's not true. If you store data on a hard drive, it's there until you write over it, assuming you don't corrupt the file system somehow. It's not going to disappear or rot or anything like that.

Also I would argue that many USB drives are as fast or faster than an SD card. Well made USB drives usually incorporate flash memory modules in RAID 0, so you are striping the data across two (or more) modules through two buses, so you get a lot more throughput.

Agreed though that an SD card is much more portable and less fragile than a standard hard drive. Granted you can get more MB/$ using an external drive over USB than an SD card, but with the price of 2 GB SD cards now, you could easily get a few for under $100 and that should be more than enough storage for Wii games.

My hope is that Nintendo allows for some firmware hacking and someone writes a frontend that at least incorporates a simple media player so you can connect that USB HDD that is full of music and movies and use the Wii as a little media center too.