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

[Jayro]

Region locking it is still nonsense.

I hope Nintendo never backpedals back to region-locking ever again. They could easily region unlock the Wii U and 3DS with software updates, but we all know they won't for whatever reason.

 

[master801]

Region locking a controller (Gamepad)? Come on, that doesn't make any sense

I'd like to think it's because every country (or region, I guess) has different regulations on communications (like the USA's FCC) since the Wii U tablet uses a wifi-like signal.

Just speculation.

 

[SDIO]

eMMCs shouldn't be even remotely close to failure at this point. What is the Wii U doing that it's always writing literal terabytes of data to the eMMC that is basically just the barebones of the OS + bootloaders in such a short time?
It also doesn't seem like we can pinpoint it to "early production", what basis is there that Nintendo stopped using them?

I agree that the chips shouldn't die now. But I don't belief that the problem is that there is to much writing. It may be possible that the Wii U is writing to much and that it will cause problems like we saw with old cheap usb pendrives but I don't belief that the problem we are seeing here comes from too much writing.
If a eMMC reaches end of life because of too much writing I would expect it to just go read only at some point and don't have this silent data corruption. If the cells are written to death, the controller should notice and replace bad blocks with reserve blocks, if it runs out of reserve blocks it will go read only.
Also these problems seem to appear after the console wasn't used in a long time. When it is not used, there are also no writes. So this points more to a to short retention period of the flash in the eMMC.

Also from what I have seen every Wii U that failed with that error had one of these Hynix chips. Are there any counter examples?

I mean, that sounds like the contents of it are married to the chip with extra steps.

If you say the chip is married to the console, I would expect the console to check the seral number or something like that of the chip. What we have here is that every console has it's own encryption key, so that if one console gets 'compromised' other consoles still stay "secure" from a Nintendo point of view. With that key all the data on the MLC is encrypted. So you can't copy one MLC to a different console. I think you could say that the MLC is married to the console, but I like to be more specific that it is about the data on the memory chip and not the hardware of the chip.

I'm not sure I'd say this is "nothing special". Flash drives with actual usage more than a bootloader like this MLC chip last immeasureably longer even from less reputable companies.
The Wii U is quite young and the chip has little lifting work to even be doing. Why has there been an apparently widespread problem with eMMC failure for years? Just how badly did Nintendo cheap out here? Did they give mostly worn NAND chips from the get-go?

I meant that is nothing special that flash has a limited retention period. That these chips lose the data so fast isn't normal, there I agree.
But how fast the flash looses the data has nothing to do with how heavy it is used. Also I wouldn't say that the chip has little lifting to do. Most of operating system is running from there, Games are installed on it and saves get written there. But yes, it still shouldn't fail that fast. I am also not sure if you can really blame it on Nintendo cheaping out. These chips just seem to be a bad and below the expectations. I think it is more likely that Hynix or the Fab messed something up.
The Wii U also isn't the only device with problematic eMMC chips. Remember the Galaxy S2 or Note? There were lot's of bricks because a bug in the Firmware of the Samsung eMMC. That also effected the HTC One S, which used the same chip. Or the Galaxy S3, there was a time where lot's of people had Data corruption after a few years and I could go on.

 

[realtimesave]

The good news is that similar to any console, emulators do it better than real hardware. The bad news is that the Wii U, more than we've ever suspected from the awful tablet debacle, is one of the biggest sources of e-waste in gaming.

I think Cemu could use a little bit more work. But all in all it is pretty good. Also, I guess you can go that route or buy another console. Used they range from $50 - $120 these days.

 

[R3DRE111AVER]

worse thing is its not just this System that as been flagged with these issues

 

[Videomanman87]

Something I want to add here. I also saw the articles, in my case it was at Verge. This is likely not due to a lot of the possible reasons here except for the Wii U not being powered for a perlonged period of time.

The reason is due to the newer design of FLASH. MLC chips (and beyond) will forget and corrupt it not powered regularly. Sandisk now recomends powering all flash devices at least once a year. SLC doesn't have this problem, but MLC and above do (which are almost ALL chips these days except for the smaller ones say 8gb or less). And it is sad the industry as a whole hasn't made this clear. Flash used to be pretty much "forever" and now it is not. And think of all the devices have flash chips now, almost everything. And if they aren't powered on a regular basis ... poof ... the data fades/disappears due to slow electro leakage between the layers. It does take a while, but leave a chip unused for 5 years is asking for it. Power them all once a year to be safe.

 

[emmanu888]

Wouldn't having automatic updates turned on be enough to mitigate the problem? Mine has that setting on so it always turns on once in a while to check for new updates, that should provide power to the NAND chip right?

 

[SDIO]

Wouldn't having automatic updates turned on be enough to mitigate the problem? Mine has that setting on so it always turns on once in a while to check for new updates, that should provide power to the NAND chip right?

Thats questionable. Because it will only read some data. If the emmc doesn't have a scrub routine, it won't notice if data that is not touched degrades. Therefore my recommendation to just do a nand backup, then every block is read and the controller can detect any error that creeped in.

 

[Videomanman87]

Wouldn't having automatic updates turned on be enough to mitigate the problem? Mine has that setting on so it always turns on once in a while to check for new updates, that should provide power to the NAND chip right?

I think it would depend on if automatic updates powers the system fully or not. The problem is liekly a lack of power for a long time and slow electro leakage from the layers in the chip. Powering it on should be enough. It is what flash manufacturers such as Sandisk now recommend to maintain the chips charge and prevent loss of data. If you power it on, it should charge all the cells since power flows through the chip at that point in order to even boot the system. Even having it plugged in *might* be enough. It depends on what parts of the board are unpowered during sleep. But personally I would power it on fully for a few minutes once a year to be safe.
All the cells don't have to be read to be 'charged', only the main chip powered. But I agree a full backup should at least give you an idea if there is a problem. And if Nintendo gave it a decent controller, move any weak blocks to spares (if that is still possible). And of course backing up is always a good idea anyway.

 

[SDIO]

@Videomanman87 why should just powering the chip keep them charged? The only time they get charged during a write

 

[Videomanman87]

@Videomanman87 why should just powering the chip keep them charged? The only time they get charged during a write

The energy leaking out and causes changes is stopped and replaced when the chip is powered. I would have to look up the white papers I read regarding this, but what you are thinking of is write changes that is different than what is happening here.

Besides if writing was the only way, manufactures wouldn't say to power the drives/chips, but to rewrite all the data every year to preserve it. But that isn't the case.

 

[ber71]

The energy leaking out and causes changes is stopped and replaced when the chip is powered. I would have to look up the white papers I read regarding this, but what you are thinking of is write changes that is different than what is happening here.

Besides if writing was the only way, manufactures wouldn't say to power the drives/chips, but to rewrite all the data every year to preserve it. But that isn't the case.

Depends. Flash storage groups a lot of different technologies. Some of them might require rewrite in order to replenish the charge supposedly trapped into the gates of certain transistors. Some others are happy with a simple power on. We don't have the details for the wiiu storage.
Justo in case, powering on once a year doesn't hurt. Rewriting seems to be out of scope.

 

[SDIO]

Besides if writing was the only way, manufactures wouldn't say to power the drives/chips, but to rewrite all the data every year to preserve it. But that isn't the case.

Depending on the controller it will do a scrub on it's own and rewrite blocks, that develop errors. Some might even do periodic rewrites. A write doesn't necessarily have to be triggered from the outside, espacially with SSDs, as they have much more sophisticated controllers. But we don't know if the wii U emmc will do this. So just powring on might not be enough in the case of the Wii U, depending on the controller.

 

[rcpd]

So I asked this question about the 3DS in the 3DS forums, but since there’s NAND issues with the Wii U, I guess it applies here as well.

Can we make an emuNAND for the Wii U? Should we be making emuNANDs before the NAND chip dies, and if we do would it save us from eventual NAND death?

 

[V10lator]

AFAIK There's currently no way for emuNAND. There is an old way but it isn't recommendet these days + it's slow af as it bypasses SLC and RAM caches.

 

[rcpd]

AFAIK There's currently no way for emuNAND. There is an old way but it isn't recommendet these days + it's slow af as it bypasses SLC and RAM caches.

That's a shame. It would be a way to revive these dying units.

 

[MikaDubbz]

What I kinda love about this flaw in the Wii U is that it effectively shows who loved and who neglected their Wii Us. I mean it's a terrible flaw don't get me wrong, but all the same if you use yours regularly and show it love, this flaw shouldn't catch up to it. I can see the comic strips making light of the situation now.

 

[rcpd]

What I kinda love about this flaw in the Wii U is that it effectively shows who loved and who neglected their Wii Us. I mean it's a terrible flaw don't get me wrong, but all the same if you use yours regularly and show it love, this flaw shouldn't catch up to it. I can see the comic strips making light of the situation now.

My Wii U is new to me. I know of a limited amount of its lifespan. I don’t think it was used often though because it’s very clean and like new. It’s an original 8Gb NAND model though so I worry about the NAND dying due to age and limited write cycles.

 

[MikaDubbz]

My Wii U is new to me. I know of a limited amount of its lifespan. I don’t think it was used often though because it’s very clean and like new. It’s an original 8Gb NAND model though so I worry about the NAND dying due to age and limited write cycles.

Well you can't change the past of your system, the best you can do now is just be a good Wii U owner and don't neglect it, try and turn it on once a week, even if you're not going to play it. Perhaps that can't ensure you won't brick somehow, but it's certainly better than t to keep it powered off for months or even years at a time.

 

[Hanafuda]

Guess I should plug mine in. I saw something about this on yt this morning, and now here. Maybe just the hot topic du jour, but now I gots to know.