(I asked at least part of this in a mega-thread but had no luck...)
I've been using an old PS3's stock 2.5" as my Wii U HDD and now I'd like to switch to an even older Samsung 3.5" I have lying around, but have some concerns about cloning.
1) Is the Wii U's recognition of the HDD tied to a hardware ID such that changing the drive, even if the new drive has otherwise identical data, renders it unrecognizable? It's been a long time but IIRC the Xbox had a key stored on the drive that needed to be edited in the event of changing HDDs without reformatting.
2) Are installed games written in a structured but raw way such that cloning to a larger drive will make expanding into the additional space trivial, or is it the case that when the drive is formatted a partition with a definitive, unchangeable endpoint is created? In other words, when I clone my 160GB to a 500GB drive, will it be recognized by the console as a 160GB drive due to a partition with a particular endpoint being cloned, or will it be recognized by its maximum capacity?
I've been using an old PS3's stock 2.5" as my Wii U HDD and now I'd like to switch to an even older Samsung 3.5" I have lying around, but have some concerns about cloning.
1) Is the Wii U's recognition of the HDD tied to a hardware ID such that changing the drive, even if the new drive has otherwise identical data, renders it unrecognizable? It's been a long time but IIRC the Xbox had a key stored on the drive that needed to be edited in the event of changing HDDs without reformatting.
2) Are installed games written in a structured but raw way such that cloning to a larger drive will make expanding into the additional space trivial, or is it the case that when the drive is formatted a partition with a definitive, unchangeable endpoint is created? In other words, when I clone my 160GB to a 500GB drive, will it be recognized by the console as a 160GB drive due to a partition with a particular endpoint being cloned, or will it be recognized by its maximum capacity?