I asked about this before, but it was more about durability back then.
Right now that isn't as much as a concern as trying to find a device that the WiiU can actually power without using a Y-Cable or an external AC adapter. I want to have two USB drives for my WiiU, one with my WiiU software and the other with my Gamecube/Wii software, since AFAIK there is no way to have both one a single drive.
I didn't like having a large mechanical drive dangling off of my WiiU, plus it needed a Y-cable to work properly with how little power the WiiU supplies to the USB ports (from what I understand it's 500mA per port, right?), so I swapped it with one of these:
I wasn't having problems, pretty much all my games were working fine, that is until I tried to go back to BotW. It would randomly crash with the error that the USB device was removed. I noticed that this pretty much always happened during autosaves, which leads me to believe it's due to how this game literally has hundreds of little files as part of it's save "file" either overloading the USB drive, making it take too long to process and make the WiiU think it failed, or just cannot provide enough power to write that many files at once.
So now I am trying to see what would be the lowest-power option without relying on AC adapters since it's already a mess back there of all sorts of cables and adapters.
Mechanical drives I am sure are right out, I need a Y-Cable to power my current one and I doubt that's changed much for modern ones, especially with many now expecting USB 3.0 USB drives many are 3.0 as well nowadays too, namely those slim-fit ones, and likely pull more power than the WiiU can supply during more strenuous workloads.
I was looking at M.2 drives, those come in both SATA and NVME. Not sure which would use less power, but I assumed SATA would, plus endurance would not be a concern since those are meant to run your PC operating system off of.
I was told there are some low-power M.2 SATA drives such as the WD SA510: https://documents.westerndigital.co...-ssd/product-brief-wd-blue-sa510-sata-ssd.pdf
Not cheap, but not too expensive, at least for 500GB. There are cheaper ones in the $20 range, but they seem to draw far more power.
Problem with that is I would also need an enclosure, and those will add additional power draw on top of that. I was looking at those dual-enclosures such as this:
And several others very similar to that concept, two M.2 drives each with their own USB port, but apparently those draw way too much power. I have no idea if there are any single M.2 SATA enclosures that would draw less. I can at least tape those to the side of my WiiU using double-sided tape or something, two 2.5 drives would be... a lot messier to do that with.
Then there is the option of MicroSD cards. From my understanding these are very low power... although how low power I don't know, and I would again need a USB adapter that itself is low power.... and preferably an adapter that is tiny (I don't want to use something that's like a standard flashdrive that will have a few inches sticking out the back of the WiiU, it would be easy to have a cable or something get caught on that and break, the whole reason I used those Samsung FIT drives was to have something flush with the back of the case that can't get caught or snagged on anything) but I know the speeds and endurance will suffer, likely even more than USB flashdrives.
So what would be the best option to have the lowest power consumption storage drive for my WiiU without resorting to external AC adapters or Y cables? M.2 SATA or NVME drives? What kind of enclosure then? MicroSD cards? A USB flashdrive that is known to work? Something else? I know there are people who have made internal modifications to the WiiU for this but I am not that skilled, and I want something easy to disconnect if need be.
Right now that isn't as much as a concern as trying to find a device that the WiiU can actually power without using a Y-Cable or an external AC adapter. I want to have two USB drives for my WiiU, one with my WiiU software and the other with my Gamecube/Wii software, since AFAIK there is no way to have both one a single drive.
I didn't like having a large mechanical drive dangling off of my WiiU, plus it needed a Y-cable to work properly with how little power the WiiU supplies to the USB ports (from what I understand it's 500mA per port, right?), so I swapped it with one of these:
I wasn't having problems, pretty much all my games were working fine, that is until I tried to go back to BotW. It would randomly crash with the error that the USB device was removed. I noticed that this pretty much always happened during autosaves, which leads me to believe it's due to how this game literally has hundreds of little files as part of it's save "file" either overloading the USB drive, making it take too long to process and make the WiiU think it failed, or just cannot provide enough power to write that many files at once.
So now I am trying to see what would be the lowest-power option without relying on AC adapters since it's already a mess back there of all sorts of cables and adapters.
Mechanical drives I am sure are right out, I need a Y-Cable to power my current one and I doubt that's changed much for modern ones, especially with many now expecting USB 3.0 USB drives many are 3.0 as well nowadays too, namely those slim-fit ones, and likely pull more power than the WiiU can supply during more strenuous workloads.
I was looking at M.2 drives, those come in both SATA and NVME. Not sure which would use less power, but I assumed SATA would, plus endurance would not be a concern since those are meant to run your PC operating system off of.
I was told there are some low-power M.2 SATA drives such as the WD SA510: https://documents.westerndigital.co...-ssd/product-brief-wd-blue-sa510-sata-ssd.pdf
Not cheap, but not too expensive, at least for 500GB. There are cheaper ones in the $20 range, but they seem to draw far more power.
Problem with that is I would also need an enclosure, and those will add additional power draw on top of that. I was looking at those dual-enclosures such as this:
And several others very similar to that concept, two M.2 drives each with their own USB port, but apparently those draw way too much power. I have no idea if there are any single M.2 SATA enclosures that would draw less. I can at least tape those to the side of my WiiU using double-sided tape or something, two 2.5 drives would be... a lot messier to do that with.
Then there is the option of MicroSD cards. From my understanding these are very low power... although how low power I don't know, and I would again need a USB adapter that itself is low power.... and preferably an adapter that is tiny (I don't want to use something that's like a standard flashdrive that will have a few inches sticking out the back of the WiiU, it would be easy to have a cable or something get caught on that and break, the whole reason I used those Samsung FIT drives was to have something flush with the back of the case that can't get caught or snagged on anything) but I know the speeds and endurance will suffer, likely even more than USB flashdrives.
So what would be the best option to have the lowest power consumption storage drive for my WiiU without resorting to external AC adapters or Y cables? M.2 SATA or NVME drives? What kind of enclosure then? MicroSD cards? A USB flashdrive that is known to work? Something else? I know there are people who have made internal modifications to the WiiU for this but I am not that skilled, and I want something easy to disconnect if need be.
