Hacking 3 TB Seagate Works...

[dexter222]

If any were curious...

The 3tb Seagate GoFlex works when formatted WBFS using Wii Backup Manager v0.3.7.
Edit: Looks like the Western Digital 3tb Mybook works as well.

It is compatible and seems to be working flawlessly with CFG Usbloader v.63

I am using ciosx20 249[57] (but have lots of others installed lol)
Edit: ***It also works with Hermes 5.1 ***

It did not work with USB Loader GX (yet

) But I'm sure they can fix it!
Edit: *** It is now compatible with USB Loader GX ***


A few things to consider:

The entire drive has to be dedicated to WBFS so you will have to use an SD card.

File sizes are a bit larger due to 4k sector size. *

It is not subject to the normal WBFS 500 file limit ( It can hold up to 4084 files. )

Drive is USB 3.0 yet WBFS seems to slow it to USB 2.0 speeds even when using a USB 3.0 port (on the PC)

 

[PsyBlade]

File sizes are substantially larger (I will post some examples later) due to 4k sector size. *

thats not because of the 4KiB sector size but the big drive size
afaik games use more space on large wbfs partitions because wbfs' "scrubbing chunk size" gets bigger
while it is fixed at 2MiB in .wbfs files

 

[Wiimm]

Yes it depends of the WBFS sector size. The WBFS support up to 65536 sectors. Therefor the sector size is calculated by "TOTALSIZE/65536". The result is rounded up to the next power of 2. The minimum value is 2MiB.

My command "wit isosize" shows the real disc usages of scrubbed discs:

ÂÂ# wit isosize pool/wdf/ -ll

ÂÂÂÂ ISOÂÂISO .wbfs 500gÂÂ 3t
ÂÂblocksÂÂMiBÂÂfile WBFS WBFSÂÂfilename
ÂÂ-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ÂÂ 16556ÂÂ517ÂÂ 524ÂÂ528ÂÂ640ÂÂpool/wdf/animal.wdf
ÂÂ 91160 2849ÂÂ2854 2864 2944ÂÂpool/wdf/mkw.wdf
ÂÂ 11328ÂÂ354ÂÂ 360ÂÂ376ÂÂ512ÂÂpool/wdf/nsmb.wdf
ÂÂ233469 7296ÂÂ7304 7320 7552ÂÂpool/wdf/ssb.wdf
ÂÂ 35134 1098ÂÂ1104 1120 1280ÂÂpool/wdf/tlz.wdf
ÂÂ101364 3168ÂÂ3174 3184 3328ÂÂpool/wdf/tra.wdf
ÂÂÂÂ 774ÂÂ 24ÂÂÂÂ30ÂÂ 48ÂÂ192ÂÂpool/wdf/wch.wdf
ÂÂÂÂ4292ÂÂ134ÂÂ 140ÂÂ152ÂÂ320ÂÂpool/wdf/wmu.wdf
ÂÂÂÂ5416ÂÂ169ÂÂ 174ÂÂ192ÂÂ320ÂÂpool/wdf/wpl.wdf
ÂÂ 20222ÂÂ632ÂÂ 638ÂÂ648ÂÂ768ÂÂpool/wdf/wsp.wdf
ÂÂ-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ÂÂTotal: 519715 blocks (16241 MiB = 16 GiB) in 10 files

 

[zizer]

what about ntfs? is it unreal?

 

[PsyBlade]

what about ntfs?
aparently wii ntfs libs are hardcoded to 512B sectors
ntfs wont work on wii with 4k drive till this is fixed
QUOTE(zizer @ Jan 26 2011, 07:14 PM) is it unreal?

I dont have the slightest idea what you are talking about but ntfs is quite real
been using it for 10+ years

 

[Wiimm]

what about ntfs? is it unreal?

Do you mean my table?
Look in the ".wbfs file" column. This size is valid for and independ of all real file systems.

 

[Nintendo_Chick]

The entire drive has to be dedicated to WBFS so you will have to use an SD card.

A little unpractical, until a loader is able to to read it from fat or multiple partitions, unless you're planning on putting 2-3 copies of every game on it.

 

[dexter222]

The entire drive has to be dedicated to WBFS so you will have to use an SD card.

A little unpractical, until a loader is able to to read it from fat or multiple partitions, unless you're planning on putting 2-3 copies of every game on it.

Right now there are about 1,000 Unique NTSC-U Titles, not counting any of the countless Custom titles like all the Guitar Hero stuff. These take up roughly 95% of a 2tb drive (NTFS as ISOs). The 3tb drive is the only solution, right now, that will allow collectors (who buy the games legally, naturally) to keep the entire North American collection on one drive. This isn't even counting PAL versions of games that aren't available in North America. For the collector, this has nothing to do with 'practicality'. Most the games are crap anyways and only a crazy person would want them all lol but there are a few of us out there.

Unfortunately this means dusting off WBFS and dragging an (until now) obsolete filesystem out of moth balls. It will be wonderful if and when we get FAT32/NTFS support for these larger drives but WBFS is a working solution that's available now... and it works (as of this weekend) on the two major USB loaders - support was added to USB Loader GX and it already worked with CFG Loader.

As far as multiple partitions... "One Drive, One Partition" should be the 11th commandment. It 'may' be possible to format part of the drive FAT32 by overriding the default sector size when formatting it in windows... but it's a moot point to me.

 

[Alkis30]

I have nearly 1100 -unique- games (2.3 TB total size - .wbfs files). I was trying to find a solution in order to have all my games alltogether on Wiiflow... From what I can tell there is no way to use this 3TB hard disk on Wii formated as FAT32 or NTFS using .wbfs games so I decided to split the games in two 2TB disks (A-L, M-Z) and to switch hard disks in USB1 slot of Wii. I can not think of any other solution right now. Maybe when Wiiflow supports IOS58 we can use the 2 USB slots at the same time ... (Just like in jtags xbox360) .Of course the ideal solution is this 3TB drive formated in FAT32/NTFS with .wbfs files in Wiiflow. What do you think ? Will that ever be possible ?

 

[PsyBlade]

I think ntfs/fat libs will have to be fixed some time
4KiB drives are the future if we like it or not

if you don't want to go 4KiB+WBFS
take a 512B drive and try either:

A) hybrid MBR/GPT
one small FAT partition for programs (HBC, USB-Loaders, ...) available via MBR+GPT (has to be smaller than 2TiB and has to be in the beginning of the drive)
one big FAT/NTFS/WBFS partition for games available via GPT only (afaik there is a loader (GX?) supporting GPT, but I dont know about hybrid)

B) without partitioning
no MBR, no GPT
one big FAT directly on the drive

you can try this out with any 512B drive regardless on its size
if it works it should work with 3TiB drives to

 

[dexter222]

I have nearly 1100 -unique- games (2.3 TB total size - .wbfs files). I was trying to find a solution in order to have all my games alltogether on Wiiflow... From what I can tell there is no way to use this 3TB hard disk on Wii formated as FAT32 or NTFS using .wbfs games so I decided to split the games in two 2TB disks (A-L, M-Z) and to switch hard disks in USB1 slot of Wii. I can not think of any other solution right now. Maybe when Wiiflow supports IOS58 we can use the 2 USB slots at the same time ... (Just like in jtags xbox360) .Of course the ideal solution is this 3TB drive formated in FAT32/NTFS with .wbfs files in Wiiflow. What do you think ? Will that ever be possible ?

QUOTE(tueidj @ Jan 30 2011, 02:15 PM) No, the usbstorage driver only allows 32-bits for specifying the requested LBA.
32 + 9 (512 byte sectors) = 41, two to the power of 41 = 2,199,023,255,552 ~= 2TB of addressable storage if the sectors are 512 bytes.

Right now the only solution for you is the 3tb Seagate with 4k sector size using WBFS - there is no way, right now, to get NTFS or FAT32 to work on the 3tb drive with the Wii. You'll probably be able to fit around 1470 games on it (not 1550 as I first guessed).

 

[steve-p]

does the wii ext2 lib support 4k sectors?

 

[famousginni]

LOL... 3TB to fill with just Wii games... My entire Wii Games Collection will probably fill up a 500GB at max.. Most of the games are usually crap..

 

[gotchapt]

LOL... 3TB to fill with just Wii games... My entire Wii Games Collection will probably fill up a 500GB at max.. Most of the games are usually crap..

Indeed.

 

[Alkis30]

Right now the only solution for you is the 3tb Seagate with 4k sector size using WBFS - there is no way, right now, to get NTFS or FAT32 to work on the 3tb drive with the Wii. You'll probably be able to fit around 1550 games on it.
[/quote]

Yes but if in the 3tb Seagate with 4k sector size using WBFS games are bigger in size than in my 2TB disk (FAT32 , .wbfs) it will not fit as many...

 

[dexter222]

Yes but if in the 3tb Seagate with 4k sector size using WBFS games are bigger in size than in my 2TB disk (FAT32 , .wbfs) it will not fit as many...

The files aren't THAT much bigger lol. You can still hold a lot more games on a 3tb than a 2tb.

982 files uses 1717.33GB on 2tb of 1853.02GB or 92.68% using NTFS
982 files uses 1865.63GB on 3tb of 2794.50GB or 66.76% using WBFS

That's 148.30GB or 8.63% more space on a 3tb WBFS drive.

A 2tb NTFS drive will hold about 1060 games
a 3tb WBFS drive will hold about 1470 games

 

[Jonthom]

Hi

Has anyone tried this with the Western Digital - My Book Essential 3TB External USB 3.0/2.0 Hard Drive?

They are on sale right now fifty bucks cheaper than the Seagate goflex.

 

[Foxi4]

Seagate sucks. Lately my 250GB Barracuda died for no reason at all. I've lost all my data, obviously I wasn't thrilled. Had the drive for only 3 years. I'll never buy any of their products again. My WD Caviar happens to work flawlessly for over 10 years. So yeah, WD is much more "resistant".

As far as External drives are concerned... Normal hard drive + enclosure > External hard drive. Just an opinion.

Also, NTFS > WBFS > Fat32. I simply can't stick with the 4GB file size limit. I like my dual-layer games, even if there aren't too many of those.

 

[PsyBlade]

Also, NTFS > WBFS > Fat32. I simply can't stick with the 4GB file size limit. I like my dual-layer games, even if there aren't too many of those.

DL-Games Work on FAT perfectly fine.
You wont even notice the automatic splitting.
Plus there are many SL-Games >4GiB

 

[dexter222]

For any wishing to use the Seagate 3tb drive on USB Loader GX you will likely need the following:

GX 2.0 r1057 or possibly later. You can launch this from Homebrew.

If you wish to use a forwarder you may need this new one:

USB Loader GX-UNEO_Forwarder_2_0_AHBPROT_NO_USB.wad

I'm told you also need IOS58 to run any of the new forwarders.


After many hours of testing, dimok and I were able to get the above solution to work. It is the solution I'm still using.