Wii U NAND ERROR Likelihood

[whatthechuck3]

Hello all,

So I just found out about all this hoopla involving the Wii U NAND failures from last year. It’s got me worried bout mine, so I wanted to see if y’all thought I should worry. I have a black 32GB model from close to launch (within a few months). The WiiU itself isn’t hacked, though I did hack the vWii portion a few years ago. But otherwise it’s running fine. So is this error just randomly going to pop up? This is the part that is still confusing to me. Is it just caused by reading/updating installed games? I mostly play games off disc. And since mine isn’t hacked with Tiramasu or anything, and the eshop being down, I will no longer be installing anything on it. Will I likely still get this error some day? What can I do to prevent it?

 

[V10lator]

Only Hynix chips from a scpecific timeframe are affected. You can check your chip with https://github.com/GaryOderNichts/WiiUIdent/releases/latest

Even if you have a Hynix from that timeframe youre not lost: Not all chips from that timeframe die.

The cause of this is still a bit unknown. IIRC it's thought that the flash cells retire the data faster than normal + there's a bug with cell refreshing, so the data saved on the chip slowly rots away.
The following is now something nobody gave an explaination yet, so just my own thinking: This data rot problem causes the FTL to mark cells as bad which aren't really bad, exhausing the backup cells pretty fast. That's why fixing the corruptions in software is just a temporary solution and the chip will go into read only mode sooner or later (no more backup cells avaiable).

 

[whatthechuck3]

Is there any way to check without hacking my WiiU?

 

[Ettino]

Is there any way to check without hacking my WiiU?

Open up the console and take it apart so you can see the actual chip.

 

[SDIO]

Is there any way to check without hacking my WiiU?

You don't need to install anything, you can run aroma directly from the browser exploit, after a reboot everything is gone again.

If you didn't experience any problems yet, you are probably fine.

I would be more conecerend about the Discs rotting away, that seems to be a problem with Wii U Discs. So I recommend dumping them as long as they still work. You can even install them then to the Wii U and they will work like eShop games.