Nintendo Wii U NAND Vulnerable To Dying If Not Powered On Often

[Dyhr]

From Nintendo? For what the machine sold, it was pretty great.

...it sold only 13.5m copies. The GameCube, which was a legendary failure, sold about 21.74m.
How did it do "pretty great"?

That's like asking why the PS5 and Xbox Series doesn't have hard drives either

But, like the others said, stop spreading bullshit and get on-topic, I even feel like you did the thread just to throw shit at the machine...

...except they do have an internal drive and can be used perfectly fine albeit with limited storage without an external device.
The best Wii U has is 32GB internal... great when Wii U games are ~25GB or so.

As for the last line, when did Generalissimo (and who is said wannabe dictator anyway) prevent me from responding to people? Someone made a post that wasn't even joking about how it's "actually the consumer's fault" that there's massive e-waste from the Wii U now.
Which it isn't. It'd never be the consumer's fault why the console was always a mangled mess. Add the NAND failures (which shouldn't even be a thing---NAND is GENERALLY very resilient, this implies a severe fault in how the Wii U even does things like... why is it obliterating its read/write cycles so fast in NORMAL USE?) to the list.

 

[godreborn]

Well, from my experience with electronics, especially when they have moving parts, stagnation is almost as bad as overuse.

 

[Magnus87]

It's probably a stupid question but in case Nintendo decided to fix this problem, could they do it through a Software update?

 

[Dyhr]

It's probably a stupid question but in case Nintendo decided to fix this problem, could they do it through a Software update?

Hypothetically... if the Wii U got a new operating system.
The issue seems to be that the Wii U makes an ungodly amount of read/writes doing normal activities. Sorry people, even cheap NAND chips do not die to not being used for a little while. Or we wouldn't have cartridges from the 1980s that still work for games and so on. That has literally nothing to do with it. If any "lack of use" was going to harm the NAND chip, you're admitting it's in such a bad state it's a literal time bomb.

The Wii U is literally running out of read/writes. That's what happens when NAND reaches its end of life for usage.

Considering most of the Wii U wasn't designed with longevity (like the whole tablet fiasco), and how little retention the Wii had after a few years, I'm not surprised the OS's severe read/write faults were 100% ignored. They didn't think anyone would care about the console a few years after owning, and certainly didn't care about e-waste.

In fact as a company, you couldn't ask for a better fault. It didn't pop up until a few years after the Wii U came out, meaning warranty is gone. Meaning you buy a new one full price. That's a company's dream come true: a product that is just bad enough to last the warranty, and not much more. ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, and MSI would kill to have such a thing happen!

Fun fact: Microsoft's Windows has periodically had updates that fried SSDs (a fast array of NAND, there is very little functional difference between an SSD, an SD card, and the NAND in your Wii U, it's all NAND) without proper controllers for read/write safety. October 2020's Windows 10 was one. Completely fried a ton of SSDs because it triggered a severe read/write loop that cheap/small SSDs didn't have any protection against.

 

[retrofan_k]

@retrofan_k Try this version: https://github.com/koolkdev/wiiu-nanddumper/releases/tag/v0.4 it should work with CBHC

Thanks. Did a quick test and it managed to run the tool. I'll do further nand backups this weekend when I got some time and update the results here. I'm I just looking for it do full nand backups to the SD card or is there other information needed?

 

[SDIO]

It's probably a stupid question but in case Nintendo decided to fix this problem, could they do it through a Software update?

No, it's ha hardware problem it can be only fixed by replacing the bad part.

Hypothetically... if the Wii U got a new operating system.
The issue seems to be that the Wii U makes an ungodly amount of read/writes doing normal activities. Sorry people, even cheap NAND chips do not die to not being used for a little while. Or we wouldn't have cartridges from the 1980s that still work for games and so on. That has literally nothing to do with it. If any "lack of use" was going to harm the NAND chip, you're admitting it's in such a bad state it's a literal time bomb.

The Wii U is literally running out of read/writes. That's what happens when NAND reaches its end of life for usage.

From what we see, this doesn't seem to be the problem. From the information we have so far it looks like one bad batch of eMMC chips. It also doesn't necessarily mean these chips were cheap, there was probably something wrong during production.
Also they don't seem to die because of writes, but seem to have just a very bad retention time. But you would have known that, if you actually read what was posted here instead of just shit posting.

In fact as a company, you couldn't ask for a better fault. It didn't pop up until a few years after the Wii U came out, meaning warranty is gone. Meaning you buy a new one full price. That's a company's dream come true: a product that is just bad enough to last the warranty, and not much more. ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, and MSI would kill to have such a thing happen!

From what I have heard Nintendo was fixing these units for free as late as 2020.

Fun fact: Microsoft's Windows has periodically had updates that fried SSDs (a fast array of NAND, there is very little functional difference between an SSD, an SD card, and the NAND in your Wii U, it's all NAND) without proper controllers for read/write safety. October 2020's Windows 10 was one. Completely fried a ton of SSDs because it triggered a severe read/write loop that cheap/small SSDs didn't have any protection against.

There are different types of NAND you know. Good SSDs also have a DRAM cache and the controller makes a huge difference. In longivity and performance.

Post automatically merged: Mar 16, 2023

@retrofan_k you could also run the mdinfo I posted above and post the output here.

 

[retrofan_k]

Post automatically merged: Mar 16, 2023

@retrofan_k you could also run the mdinfo I posted above and post the output here.

Can that be used with cbhc?

 

[Dyhr]

No, it's ha hardware problem it can be only fixed by replacing the bad part.

From what we see, this doesn't seem to be the problem. From the information we have so far it looks like one bad batch of eMMC chips. It also doesn't necessarily mean these chips were cheap, there was probably something wrong during production.
Also they don't seem to die because of writes, but seem to have just a very bad retention time. But you would have known that, if you actually read what was posted here instead of just shit posting.


From what I have heard Nintendo was fixing these units for free as late as 2020.


There are different types of NAND you know. Good SSDs also have a DRAM cache and the controller makes a huge difference. In longivity and performance.

Post automatically merged: Mar 16, 2023

@retrofan_k you could also run the mdinfo I posted above and post the output here.

It's not just one batch. 160-0103 isn't a new or isolated error, it's been circulating for years, the new thing is verifying what causes it.

Nintendo "fixes" are also a double-edged sword. Have fun losing savefiles and downloaded content or games since Nintendo just ships you a new Wii U. They aren't going to swap out/fix the NAND.

Yes, there are different kinds of NAND, but NAND is still NAND. The Wii U is misusing its NAND, it has little to do with using a "cheap" or "bad" one. Its exhibiting the behavior of an end-stage SSD/SD card and that doesn't happen without a catastrophic amount of read/writes.

 

[V10lator]

@Dyhr How do you explain launch-day units used almost daily and still working just fine today then? I mean according to your explanation they should all have this error...

Why are Hynix MLC chips from a specific production time the only chips failing?

Why aren't SLC chips failing while SLC caches all MLC writes (so has way more writes than MLC) ?

That said you clearly don't know what you're talking about but you are just repeating what (also missinformed) YouTubers are saying.

 

[Dyhr]

@Dyhr How do you explain launch-day units used almost daily and still working just fine today then? I mean according to your explanation they should all have this error...

Why are Hynix MLC chips from a specific production time the only chips failing?

Why aren't SLC chips failing while SLC caches all MLC writes (so has way more writes than MLC) ?

That said you clearly don't know what you're talking about but you are just repeating what (also missinformed) YouTubers are saying.

What's your proof other than "trust me broseph" that it's only "Hynix MLC" chips? The error is years old, and can affect legitimate non-homebrew/CFW users. who's inspecting their NAND chips? Excessively few people.

It's also mind boggling how silly it is for you to say "well, some launch-day units work, so all units work, therefore, no failures, YOU MEAN NINTENDO HATER NEER NEER NEER"...

"Why isn't SLC failing despite it having a far higher endurance than MLC" isn't the slam dunk you think it is.

I don't know what Miss Informed has been saying on YouTube, or care, really.

 

[V10lator]

What's your proof other than "trust me broseph" that it's only "Hynix MLC" chips?

Community collected data like https://hackmd.io/d12Fq9g-QlCjN2HJp7Yvew?view ... See, the community is actually collecting failed NAND reports in an attempt to get the real root of the issue while you're just talking out of your ass.

The error is years old

Show me a time in the past where multiple consoles died like today, else past issues where just normal NAND malfuntions you have everywhere.

It's also mind boggling how silly it is for you to say "well, some launch-day units work, so all units work

I never said that. You said it's excessive writes killing all Wii Us, I just showed you this can't be true.

 

[rcpd]

What's your proof other than "trust me broseph" that it's only "Hynix MLC" chips? The error is years old, and can affect legitimate non-homebrew/CFW users. who's inspecting their NAND chips? Excessively few people.

It's also mind boggling how silly it is for you to say "well, some launch-day units work, so all units work, therefore, no failures, YOU MEAN NINTENDO HATER NEER NEER NEER"...

"Why isn't SLC failing despite it having a far higher endurance than MLC" isn't the slam dunk you think it is.

I don't know what Miss Informed has been saying on YouTube, or care, really.

The thing is, I've yet to read anyone from anywhere having issues with any other NAND chip but the SKHynix chips. I've heard of exactly one Samsung NAND dying, but at least 18 SKHynix chips all from the same date code. See: https://hackmd.io/d12Fq9g-QlCjN2HJp7Yvew?view

Look, we get it. You don't like the Wii U. You don't have to. You also don't have to come into the Wii U forums and start beefing with their users for no other reason than to stroke your ego. I do hope you have a much better time here at GBATemp. Go enjoy some forums for platforms you do know things about and enjoy playing.

 

[SDIO]

It's not just one batch. 160-0103 isn't a new or isolated error, it's been circulating for years, the new thing is verifying what causes it.

Do you have any data to back that up? I would be interested if you know of non launch consoles with hynix chip that failed that way?

Nintendo "fixes" are also a double-edged sword. Have fun losing savefiles and downloaded content or games since Nintendo just ships you a new Wii U. They aren't going to swap out/fix the NAND.

From what I heared they transferred your data. But I don't know if they trannfered the data just to a new console or replaced the eMMC. With the right tools it's easy to properly swap the chip and certainly in the capabilities of Nintendo. With the PS3 Sony even swapped the GPU, which requires much more sophisticated tools.

Yes, there are different kinds of NAND, but NAND is still NAND. The Wii U is misusing its NAND, it has little to do with using a "cheap" or "bad" one.

Why do you think it is misusing the NAND? No one said they where using cheap NAND / emmc but they just had a bad batch, which can also happen with expensive NAND. It seems Nintendo put quite some thought into using the right type of NAND for the right job. They used the large, but slower and limited in write cycles MLC eMMC as the mass storage but put the fast raw SLC NAND chip with a much better write endurance in front of it as a cache. Many middle class SSDs do something similar. Also they put the logs, which are write heavy on the SLC (but maybe they just did that because MLC gets only enabled later in the boot process). Also Android is running of eMMC for many years and your average Windows or Android should do much more writes then Cafe OS.

Its exhibiting the behavior of an end-stage SSD/SD card and that doesn't happen without a catastrophic amount of read/writes.

What makes you belief that? Data retention time can decrease with many P/E cycles, but also chips with a production error would show the same behavior. And it seems this problems affects more consoles that weren't used that much but stored away, than heavily used ones.
If a eMMC was written to death you would expect it to go to a read only mode. Because the controller would notice the bad blocks and replace them with reserve blocks, if it runs out of reserve blocks it goes into a read only mode to prevent data loss. The same is true for SD cards and USB drives.

What's your proof other than "trust me broseph" that it's only "Hynix MLC" chips? The error is years old, and can affect legitimate non-homebrew/CFW users. who's inspecting their NAND chips? Excessively few people.

But some people did and they overwhelmingly have these Hynix chips. Or at least know they have a black console from near the launch. It is good to be critical, but you aren't critical you just say it's something else without any evidence or clues.
You basically have two claims:
1. The Wii U OS is doing excessive writes (why do you think that is the case?)
2. The eMMC is failing because of excessive writes (how does this fit the data we have so far?)

Also if it were really a problem a problem of excessive writes, the 8GB models should be hit even harder. You would expect that it only endure a fourth of the total capacity written, as it only has a forth as the capacity, so the same blocks get written more often.

Community collected data like https://hackmd.io/d12Fq9g-QlCjN2HJp7Yvew?view ... See, the community is actually collecting failed NAND reports in an attempt to get the real root of the issue while you're just talking out of your ass.

I didn't knew of that. This looks like a good resource.
From the two CIDs that were posted there both eMMCs were produced in January 2013. This point's to a longer timeframe and not just one bad batch, because mine had da production data of August 2012.

Also the Samsung just had "DATA CORRUPTION" and not "MEDIA ERROR" in the log. So there the eMMC didn't necessarily failed, but it could also be just a power off druing a write. But since we are also counting Hynix ones with just "DATA CORRUPTION" as an eMMC failure, we also have to count the Samsung one.
It would also be interesting what the base distribution of the diffrent vendors ist, maybe Nintendo just used 18 times more Hynix chips than Samsung chips.
Maybe everyone in this thread runs the mdinfo from above and posts the result, to collect some data on that.

 

[V10lator]

January 2013. This point's to a longer timeframe and not just one bad batch, because mine had da production data of August 2012.

These are 5 months difference, so could still be from the same batch even if unlikely.

maybe Nintendo just justed 18 times more Hynix chip

This is something I said multiple times on some Discord servers and is also one of the reason I love to say we don't have enough data to draw a full picture yet.

 

[SDIO]

These are 5 months difference, so could still be from the same batch even if unlikely.

This is really the date when the eMMC was made not the Wii U. So if it was the same batch of eMMC chips I would really expect them to have the same date.
But to argue against that: it's quite possible that the Controller and the NAND are two different dies just packaged together. So maybe the NAND is from the same batch, but the controllers aren't.
Or maybe they had one big run at the Fab and then took a couple of months to package and verify it and only programmed the cid at the end.

Maybe someone want's to file down the epoxy package to see whats inside...

 

[Clector]

I'll like to remember people that the early production is a lot more than people here may think, Nintendo expected the Wii U to sell well. It's only after launch that they were reducing their sales expectations, time after time after time.

Also for bundles, it's not rare for Nintendo to try to get rid of old stock with them.

They have done that with the Switch as well, selling consoles with the original SoC design when the Mariko already released, or selling the later normal models Switch after the OLED released, again in bundles.

 

[Dyhr]

Do you have any data to back that up? I would be interested if you know of non launch consoles with hynix chip that failed that way?


From what I heared they transferred your data. But I don't know if they trannfered the data just to a new console or replaced the eMMC. With the right tools it's easy to properly swap the chip and certainly in the capabilities of Nintendo. With the PS3 Sony even swapped the GPU, which requires much more sophisticated tools.


Why do you think it is misusing the NAND? No one said they where using cheap NAND / emmc but they just had a bad batch, which can also happen with expensive NAND. It seems Nintendo put quite some thought into using the right type of NAND for the right job. They used the large, but slower and limited in write cycles MLC eMMC as the mass storage but put the fast raw SLC NAND chip with a much better write endurance in front of it as a cache. Many middle class SSDs do something similar. Also they put the logs, which are write heavy on the SLC (but maybe they just did that because MLC gets only enabled later in the boot process). Also Android is running of eMMC for many years and your average Windows or Android should do much more writes then Cafe OS.


What makes you belief that? Data retention time can decrease with many P/E cycles, but also chips with a production error would show the same behavior. And it seems this problems affects more consoles that weren't used that much but stored away, than heavily used ones.
If a eMMC was written to death you would expect it to go to a read only mode. Because the controller would notice the bad blocks and replace them with reserve blocks, if it runs out of reserve blocks it goes into a read only mode to prevent data loss. The same is true for SD cards and USB drives.



But some people did and they overwhelmingly have these Hynix chips. Or at least know they have a black console from near the launch. It is good to be critical, but you aren't critical you just say it's something else without any evidence or clues.
You basically have two claims:
1. The Wii U OS is doing excessive writes (why do you think that is the case?)
2. The eMMC is failing because of excessive writes (how does this fit the data we have so far?)

Also if it were really a problem a problem of excessive writes, the 8GB models should be hit even harder. You would expect that it only endure a fourth of the total capacity written, as it only has a forth as the capacity, so the same blocks get written more often.


I didn't knew of that. This looks like a good resource.
From the two CIDs that were posted there both eMMCs were produced in January 2013. This point's to a longer timeframe and not just one bad batch, because mine had da production data of August 2012.

Also the Samsung just had "DATA CORRUPTION" and not "MEDIA ERROR" in the log. So there the eMMC didn't necessarily failed, but it could also be just a power off druing a write. But since we are also counting Hynix ones with just "DATA CORRUPTION" as an eMMC failure, we also have to count the Samsung one.
It would also be interesting what the base distribution of the diffrent vendors ist, maybe Nintendo just used 18 times more Hynix chips than Samsung chips.
Maybe everyone in this thread runs the mdinfo from above and posts the result, to collect some data on that.

Do you think everyone with a dead Wii U opens their console to see what NAND they have? Especially when until recently we'd have had no idea to even look at the NAND since "160-0103" is not descriptive of a single thing going wrong?

You also keep asking me "how do you KNOW how NAND dies, hmm? how do you KNOW what is bad for NAND, hmm?" in such a pretentious fashion. Let's flip this. How do YOU know that it's all Hynix NAND, hmm?

Read/write capacities do not linearly go up with NAND size, by the way. That's a really weird thing to even claim.
The 8GB ones would have literally no use for downloaded games other than maybe a VC re-re-re-re-release here and there. This would save it precious read/write cycles over the 32GB one, which can potentially fit a Wii U game, maybe even two.

"Low quality" NAND just doesn't die like Nintoadies seem to think. Or we'd have no functioning PSPs, we'd have no functioning DSis, we'd have no functioning memory cards for older consoles, no functioning carts, etc. It's an OS fault that's causing this because the NAND chips are literally worn. Why is this happening?

Post automatically merged: Mar 16, 2023

I'd also like to add that there was a similar "foregone conclusion" ("Nintendo is never at fault! It is those mean Hynix chips! Or the fact that people don't power it! Or... something, but not Nintendo!") about the PS3's Yellow Light of Death.

Accepted commonly to be a dead GPU. Then a few years ago someone "revived" a PS3 by replacing a supposedly problematic capacitor near the GPU. This got somehow accepted as the cause of a YLOD.
Nope. It was neither. The PS3 got so hot it was desoldering its own GPU via stress/actual melting enough to malform or, worse, crack solder balls.

Why did the latter (the capacitor) ever fix it for people? Reflowing. You're not removing that capacitor or doing anything to it without effectively reflowing the GPU. Additionally, no one's taking apart their PS3 to get that low-level on it without cleaning out the fans and replacing the horrific thermal "paste" Sony put on it initially. It getting reflowed and much needed TLC is why it was frequently brought back to life.

Again. NAND chips do not reach the end of their capacity for no reason. Perhaps the Hynix chips weren't a great quality. Perhaps the lack of power didn't help either. But that won't kill NAND. NAND dies because it's either being melted (see: really bad Chinese SSDs) or, more realistically, it's at the end of its read/write cycles. It's dying in a very strange and specific way.

I can tell you one real bad issue here about the Wii U OS: why on earth is it running a freaking RAID 1 of NAND chips for the freaking eMMC? It's not benefiting at all and its instead contributing to why the Wii U is able to even die so fast.

 

[NinStar]

I did a full teardown on my current console just to check which NAND it uses, and it's indeed a Hynix. I don't know what year exactly it was manufactured, but based on the serial code it appears to be one of the earliest models. The person who sold it to me hadn't used it for more over 4 years by the time I bought it, still to this day it didn't show a single memory error message. I even did a second full backup recently to see if it would fail at any point during the process, not a single error.

 

[Magnus87]

Is there any tool like "CrystalDiskInfo" or "SSD Life" to know the current health of the NAND of the WiiU? I'm not talking about bad sectors, but about being able to see the writing limits.

 

[HandsomeJack]

I did a full teardown on my current console just to check which NAND it uses, and it's indeed a Hynix. I don't know what year exactly it was manufactured, but based on the serial code it appears to be one of the earliest models. The person who sold it to me hadn't used it for more over 4 years by the time I bought it, still to this day it didn't show a single memory error message. I even did a second full backup recently to see if it would fail at any point during the process, not a single error.

I got mine (for free as a result of trading in a lot of other stuff) from CeX in the UK. I suspect that's a self-selecting way of getting one which is less likely to fail.