Hardware What is the largest SD card the Wii can use?

[DinohScene]

SUN DRIVES ARE COOL.. only thing I am thinking is the user interface does not look that well layed out, not for a full collection of gamecube games.

but I am inpressed by the sun drive

It has inspired me to ask people on facebook general discussions about hard mods and ask what top game changing hard mods are there out there any console ? I know a few.

but could you just make a extra case mod attached to the wii and have some Hard disk plugged in so it looks like one console.

Internal solutions are always neater.
Sundrive game change menu is fine.
No need for fancy cover art, only slows it down, hogs RAM and is kinda pointless anyway.
Especially since you don't stare at your menu for hours.

 

[Sogun]

Sorry if this is considered necrobumping. I didn't feel like starting a new topic existing this one.

Since the early Wii days I've been using a 2GB Kingston SD card for HBC apps. For some reason I thought that that was the perfect SD card for the Wii, probably because at that time I used a HDD to storage everything else and didn't need any extra space; and also because firmware 4.0 wasn't out yet. But lately I've been updating my apps and I ran out of space.

I've read the full topic and it seems clear to me that I can have massive storage from the SD slot. That really comes in handy because thanks to that I'm thinking of moving all my roms to the SD card and just leave the HDD for Wii, GC and multimedia (the HDD needs external power and I have to turn it on and off everytime I use it It gets anoying).

I have some questions:

The SD card slot is limited to around 2 MB/s regardless of what kind of card you use. [...] Wii is limited to USB 2.0 (so you can't get higher than ~45 MB/s anyway), and most games only expect a maximum of 5-6 MB/s due to the speed of the disc drive.

1) Does that mean that anything above Class 2 SD cards won't make a difference in speed while transfering from the SD slot?

I used a PNY 256gb (formatted as fat 32) for a while, but because it was so large it ran rather slow. I switched back to using a smaller sd card with a hard drive because it ran faster. I really wanted it to work but everything just took forever to load

2) I'm thinking about purchasing a 32 or 64 GB SD card. Is this a common thing, just related to some brands or do I have to look at a certain feature so it won't happen to me?

SD/SDHC/SDXC they all work size does not matter, Just be careful what card you buy not all sd cards are compatible with the wii.

3) Any known brands that have compatibility issues? Any known brand that hasn't? What would you recommend?

4) Is there anything else that I should take into account?

Thanks.

 

[GerbilSoft]

1) Does that mean that anything above Class 2 SD cards won't make a difference in speed while transfering from the SD slot?

Correct, though you might want a higher speed class when using the SD card on your PC for data transfer.

 

[ratmandom]

@Sogun
You can use massive sized usb hard drives so the sd card is not much of a biggie to some people - @DinohScene mentioned the "wii Sundrive" that is in built attachment, he does not like external things.

When formatting a wii usb hard drive over 2tb in fat32(what the wii only understands FAT32) check this out.

convert MBR to GPT
MBR partition tables only support up to 2TB. That is why you see the 2TB limit for FAT32.

https://www.disk-partition.com/articles/format-3tb-hard-drive-to-fat32-4125.html

The WII will read massive sized drives.

 

[Sogun]

In the end I purchased a class C10 64GB SanDisk microSDXC card with adapter. It's working great.
The only thing I noticed is that the Homebrew Channel takes longer to load than with my older SD card. I think it's because I formated this new microSD card with a 4KB cluster. I forgot what my older SD card cluster size was and didn't know how to figure it out. Maybe I'll try to reformat it with a 32 KB cluster.

Good call with transfering files from PC, I totally forgot that was a factor, hehe.

I already have an external 2TB HDD, but it needs external power and it seems excesive to me to turn it on to play NES or SNES roms XD.

 

[CoverBoy]

I have been using a Topram 64GB class 10 for a couple of years with no problems

hello. there are two versions of your sd card on ebay. is it the gold colored sd crd or the black and red colored sd card that you use for your wii?

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I have been using a Topram 64GB class 10 for a couple of years with no problems

 

[FancyNintendoGamer567]

Try the orange one, make sure to use guiformat to format it to FAT32.

 

[godreborn]

be sure to check the card upon arrival. ebay is filled with fakes.

 

[CoverBoy]

Try the orange one, make sure to use guiformat to format it to FAT32.

awesome. thanks. guiformat worked. your a genius. i purchased a 64gb card and used guiformat.

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be sure to check the card upon arrival. ebay is filled with fakes.

it works. thanks. i am adding snes roms now and sega roms will be next. i tried mame. some roms work and some dont.

 

[CoverBoy]

***UPDATE*** i apologize if this is not the place to discuss it but i grow weary of doing emulation/roms for Wii. I'd rather buy a SDcard with games/emulators pre loaded (and working) already to save me time and energy. Any suggestions as to where to buy it from? I want the games to have the titles/covers as well lol.

 

[Deleted User]

Does the Wii use exclusively FAT32? I kinda hate that because it doesn't let 4GB files be stored untouched.

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Try the orange one, make sure to use guiformat to format it to FAT32.

God dammit. It really is FAT32 only. Sigh.

 

[FancyNintendoGamer567]

Yeah, the Wii is mostly FAT32. The only exceptions are usually USB-based homebrew which can support NTFS and other filesystems.