SDUSB - The modern way to play Wii U games from SD - at full speed

Why?

​Even though the Wii U has a built in SD slot, it doesn't support using it as a storage expansion to store Wii U games (unlike it's predecessor). USB pen drives are notoriously unreliable and hard drives are bulky and require extra power or a Y cable, using up multiple ports. Today big reliable SD cards have become cheap. Since a SD is needed anyway for homebrew, it would be nice to use that too as storage for games.
There have been solutions in the past like Loadiine, but this had various problems, the biggest of them performance and is not longer supported by current homebrew environments (Aroma).

SDUSB

​SDUSB solves these problems. It uses a second partition on the SD card, which will be formatted to the Wii Us native file system and therefore run at full speed. The partition will show up as a USB device and can therefore be managed using the built in Data Management in the system settings. SaveMii, WUP Installers etc. all work with this, like it is a USB storage device. Also HAI (VC Wii Titles) work with SDUSB.
SDUSB does all that by patching IOSU (the OS that runs on the ARM processor). It is implemented as a stroopwafel plugin.

If you instead want to partition your USB HDD to use it for Wii U games and other stuff look here: https://gbatemp.net/threads/usb-partition-use-partitioned-usb-hdds-with-the-wii-u.656209/

Prerequisites

​You need two things:
  1. a way to launch minute
  2. a reliable SD card
For 1. the recommended way is to setup ISFShax, for that we have a guide here: How to set up ISFShax
If you don't want to commit to installing ISFShax yet you can skip the "Installing ISFShax" step in the ISFShax setup guide and instead run it manually through the chosen exploit on every reboot.
Instead if ISFShax you can also use defuse, in case you have that already.

For 2. It is highly recommended that you use an Endurance branded SD card from a reputable brand. Since your save games will also be saved there, you rather want to spend $5 more then to lose all your save games because your cheapo sd card died. Also be aware of fakes, even on Amazon you can get fake SD cards...
The speed of the SD card isn't too important, as the Wii U is limited to 25MB/s (same as the internal memory) anyway. Every somewhat recent SD card should be able to get that speed. Choose Reliability > Access Time > Throughput.

Setup

Partitioning the SD card​

On Windows you need to use a third party tool like Minitool Partition Wizard or Easeus, on Linux you can use gparted.
You need to have two primary partitions on the card:
  1. FAT32 - (in gparted set lba flag). This is what the PC will see and all your homebrew goes (you should already have this)
  2. NTFS - This partition will be the "USB", you use to store the Wii U games on (don't assign a drive letter)
Shrink the existing FAT32 partition to make room and then create the primary NTFS partition after it. It's recommended to align the Partitions on 64MiB boundaries and use a multiple of 64MiB for the size. NTFS won't be the file system the Wii U will be using, it is just there to tell SDUSB which partition to use (it will pick the first NTFS one). The Wii U will later format it with it's own file system.

Installing the Plugin​

Get the latest wafel_sd_usb.ipx from here: https://github.com/jan-hofmeier/wafel_sd_usb/releases and place it in your ios_plugins folder. That is either wiiu/ios_plugins on the SD card or /sys/hax/ios_plugins on the slc. For slc you have to rename it to something shorter like sdusb.ipx

Using SDUSB

​If you now boot back up, the Partition shows up as a USB device, which needs to be formatted and can then be used as usual. After formatting the SDUSB, you can also connect an existing USB storage and copy stuff over.
sdusb.jpg

Known Problems

  • GC VC Injectes don't work when installed to the SDUSB (they still work from Internal Memory)
 
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almmiron

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i'm currently using external ssd, but i have a spare 256gb (enough for my games) sandisk laying around (not high endurance), and the "clean" setup would be awesome.will look into this.

So why the high endurance sd is important? I know that it will 'endure' but... theres' something more?
 
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Blythe93

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So why the high endurance sd is important? I know that will 'endurance'..But there' something more?
Probably due to the fact that flash memory devices have a limited number of writes and are not suited for a long term storage and so many constant writes. Another reason is probably the Wii U's proprietary file system, but I can't recall what was the exact reason.

Therefore, endurance cards are much better suited for that task as they generally last longer. Externally-powered HDDs are still probably the safest long-term solution for game storage. Endurance SD card should be the most convenient option.
 

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Cause the internal NAND got damaged and they don't want to solder.
I find one thing very funny...before Tiramisu/Aroma was developed for the Wii U, pretty much nobody cared that the Nand chips were dying. So really...NOBODY really cared. Whereby... back then, users were more likely to “accidentally” brick their consoles by mishandling CBHC xD

It's great and all that there are tools to prevent this problem. Or to fix it. In case you haven't noticed, not every existing wii u is affected by this problem. Or rather, not to the extent that it's always overdramatized.

Therefore...an emunand is unnecessary for the wii u. And what's more, the rednand on the wii u sucks and is slow.
 

depaul

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Wow very interesting advancement!

However, I never thought WiiU could reach full 25 MB/s reading speed from SD card.
I always thought it only supported early Class10 SD cards (Loadiine is the culprit)
 
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V10lator

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NOBODY really cared.
Or just nobody knew? There weren't that many known cases before Nintendo shutted down the eShop which caused many to get their Wii Us out of storage and then notice the issue. This really had nothing to do with Aroma nor Tiramisu:

Nintendo eShop shutown: 27. Mar. 2023
First fix for 160-0103 by @SDIO: 19. Feb. 2023
Voultar talks about the 160-0103 error on YouTube: 18. Mar. 2023
Aroma release: 6. Sep. 2022
Tiramisu release: 31. Dec. 2021

(it's btw coincidence that the fix happened this closely to the shutdown).

In case you haven't noticed, not every existing wii u is affected by this problem.
In case you haven't noticed I spoke specifically about users affected, not about all Wii U owners.

Also all and every flash based chip will die at some point in time, these few affected eMMCs just do it sooner than expected. So all this NAND-fixing work is also preperation for the future.
 

lordelan

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I would be interested in this. I probably wouldn't use a USB HDD (they're slower than SD cards), but external SSDs are pretty cheap, and the speed advantage can't be overlooked.
I think it's probably more difficult to do it with USB, because the Wii U wants complete control over any USB drive it sees, but normally ignores the SD card (in Wii U mode)
To take away its stranglehold over USB drives, we first need to patch out the existing USB drive detection (so it won't ask to format anything inserted that is not what the Wii U expects) and r/w routines, only to then reimplement all of it to work with drives that are partitioned differently. Patching out those checks would generally be a good idea anyways, so uStealth will no longer be required for vWii drives. (Does Tiramisu or Aroma already do something like this? I haven't tried them yet)
In my opinion, that would be the holy grail. Being able to play everything off of a single, cheap, fast and reliable drive. Which you could already do with SDUSB, but SD cards are only marginally more reliable than flash drives in my experience, and the r/w speed on the Wii U's SD reader is not that good, so it's not the ideal solution, but certainly way better than needing 2 USB HDDs.
At least the AromaBasePlugin disables the "format drive" popups:
https://github.com/wiiu-env/AromaBasePlugin
 

SDIO

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So let me get this strait. We need to insall an additional hack ontop of Aroma, this ISFShax? I thought that was a hack that was mostly used to unbrick some machines and was mostly for, wii U techs for lack of a better term. We couldn't use this plugin with just vanilla Aroma?
Just because we use ISFShax for redNAND and brick protection, doesn't mean we can't use it for more things. Maybe in the future it will also become the way to launch Aroma instead of FailST, we will see...
Aroma is mostly about the PPC side of things. It does some IOSU patches in the mocha module, but all in all it doesn't have great facilities to do IOSU (the ARM side) patches, especially if they become more complex. There is basically no way to do these patches in a nice way in aroma as a plugin. They would need to be be integrated into mocha (which would be possible, but still annoying to do).
Stroopwafel on the other hand makes IOSU patching very easy and has a plugin system for that, so that's what I chose. There are multiple ways of launching stroopwafel, ISFShax is just the most convenient way for a permanent setup. Also this was just more of an experiment to test out some facilities in stroopwafel and a new mechanic of implementing redNAND and to see if it was really as easy as it seemed. The redNAND included in the latest stroopwafel works very similar to this plugin.

how does this compare with rednand? I assume same performance?
It's basically the same, just with a different target device type. There are a few more subtle differences, but the performance relevant path is basically the same.

To better illustrate the performance impact, this is all the code that is added to the critical path, that is executed once per r/w operation:

C:
static int read_wrapper(void *device_handle, u32 lba_hi, u32 lba, u32 blkCount, u32 blockSize, void *buf, void *cb, void* cb_ctx){
    return real_read(device_handle, lba_hi, lba + sdusb_offset, blkCount, blockSize, buf, cb, cb_ctx);
}

static int write_wrapper(void *device_handle, u32 lba_hi, u32 lba, u32 blkCount, u32 blockSize, void *buf, void *cb, void* cb_ctx){
    return real_write(device_handle, lba_hi, lba + sdusb_offset, blkCount, blockSize, buf, cb, cb_ctx);
}


static void crypto_hook(trampoline_state *state){
    static u32 usb_crypto_handle = 0;
    if(state->r[5] == sdusb_size){
        if(learn_usb_crypto_handle){
            learn_usb_crypto_handle = false;
            usb_crypto_handle = state->r[0];
            debug_printf("%s: learned mlc crypto handle: 0x%X\n", MODULE_NAME,  usb_crypto_handle);
        }
        if(usb_crypto_handle == state->r[0]){
            state->r[0] = NO_CRYPTO_HANDLE;
        }
    }
}

You can also mount the MLC partition of a redNAND as USB on the sysNAND using SDUSB


max allowed 2 TB
If you find a HDD, which exposes 4k sectors (compared to the standard 512B) you could theoretically go up to 16TB. I connected a 10TB 4kn drive and formatted it. In the log I could see that it was detected and formatted with the full 10TB. The Data Management showd it only with 2TB tough, but NUSspli detected it with the full capacity.
Maybe I could make a plugin to emulate 4k sectors on a 512byte sector drive.

Striping over two drives would also be interesting for performance, since then two USB ports could be utilized simoustanously. Already thought about doing that with the SDcard and the eMMC, but that is way down the prio list... Maybe if I feel like it one day....


Why are people using an emuNAND/redNAND on the Wii U
I think most redNAND users use it to work around a bad eMMC. But before SDUSB that was also a way to use the SD for game storage, since you could basically have an arbitary size Internal sorage with that. Also the write perofrmance on redNAND is better than the internal memory (because on redNAND SCFM is usally disabled). Also maybe having a second test system could be useful to some people. And if you have multiple Wii Us in different locations you can take your system with you on the SD.


Is there any chance to also achieve this as part of the vWii HDD?
If we could have a big HDD with a FAT32 partition for homebrew and vWii stuff and another primary NTFS partition (of up to 2 TB) that then can be used to be formatted into the Wii U format, that'd be great.
I was expecting this question. I have thought about this, but I want to do other things first. As I already wrote this was more of an experiment.
Also there are a few problems or at least things that need to be considered with this:
  • USB inits too late to use it for coldbooting homebrew
  • People might want to have a NTFS partition as a real NTFS partition, so another way to mark the partition to use for WFS might be better, but not sure yet.
  • I don't really like using USB for the Wii U
Advantage for me is instead of 2 USB drives that I have to physically switch out for my Wii U games and for all my Wii and Wiiware games, I can just keep the vWii drive connected at all times and with all my Wii U games being loaded on the second partition of my SD card. Hell, now I can migrate all of my emulator and Nintendont games from my SD card to the vWii drive that still has plenty of space, freeing up space for Wii U games on the SD card.
Why don't you just put all the Wii / GC games on the SD card and the Wii U games on USB? Also VC injectes might be an option? I don't really get why people have these two HDD setups. (OK it made sense in the past when larger SD cards where expensive and we didn't know how to do VC injects, but today?)


Very useful. But isn't it going to wear out the SD card quickly? The Wii U supposedly hammers USB drives with writes constantly.
I second that. I never saw any evidence for that other than "ohh my cheapo flash drive died". I used a SATA SSD as MLC (which should get even more access than USB, since the system runs from it) and I couldn't get the SMART counters for the wear (GB written, total flash writes, max write count) to nuge in over 6h of playing MK8 and a little of other games. Of course other games might write more or less, but honestly there isn't much going on, the system is pretty simple, most will just be saves.
I might put some instrumentation in to collect some more precise statistics...

The main reason USB flash drives aren't recommended isn't because they're unreliable (although they certainly are), limited number of write cycles is an inherent flaw of flash storage and that is just as true for SD cards.
And flash gets also used in SSDs, which run Windows and also as storage in datacenters which hammer them with Terabytes each day. It's about what kind of flash gets used, which quality it has and how it is managed.
SSDs usally get the best flash, if it is too bad for that, it might go to SD cards, if it is too bad for that it might go into a flash drive, if it is to bad for that, they scrape their names of the package and it goes into some other flash drive. You get the idea...
It is expected for most flash drives that they die and that might happen while it is plugged into a Wii U or while you stand in front of the room and want to open your presentation.
And of course there are enough bad SD cards. That's why I recommended using the endurance branded one. There Sandisk and Samsung actually give numbers for how man TBW it should last and there I have more confidence that they did their due diligence and implemented proper wear leveling, which might not be true for all SD cards.


I would be interested in this. I probably wouldn't use a USB HDD (they're slower than SD cards), but external SSDs are pretty cheap, and the speed advantage can't be overlooked.
Both are limited by USB in terms of thoughput. The only advantage a SSD might give you on the Wii U would be the access time. I didn't find that it makes a hughe difference, even if it is connected directly via SATA internally (instead of USB).


I think it's probably more difficult to do it with USB, because the Wii U wants complete control over any USB drive it sees, but normally ignores the SD card (in Wii U mode)
To take away its stranglehold over USB drives, we first need to patch out the existing USB drive detection (so it won't ask to format anything inserted that is not what the Wii U expects) and r/w routines, only to then reimplement all of it to work with drives that are partitioned differently.
Nah it's much simpler. The same approch I use for SDUSB should also work for that. I would just hook where the device gets attached to SAL, clone the structure and change the dev type for the one that should show up as SD and adjust the size and add the offset to the writed and reads for the wfs partition and attach both structures.


the r/w speed on the Wii U's SD reader is not that good
The physical speed is the same as the eMMC (internal Memory). What makes SD access slow on the Wii U, is the not so good FAT32 driver of the Wii U (prfile). But when we use it with SDUSB the USB partion will be in wfs anyway and therefore getting good performance.


So why the high endurance sd is important? I know that it will 'endure' but... theres' something more?
It's just that I have more trust in them that they are not garbage. The manufacturer gives actual numbers for how much writing it can sustain. Of course you should still make backups. Every storage media can suddenly die.


I find one thing very funny...before Tiramisu/Aroma was developed for the Wii U, pretty much nobody cared that the Nand chips were dying. So really...NOBODY really cared.
You might not have cared, but media outlets even back in 2019 seemed to care enough to report on it and even Nintendo cared enough to replace these units. Also the affected users certainly cared.


Or to fix it. In case you haven't noticed, not every existing wii u is affected by this problem.
He talked about the users who were affected, and they were - by definition- affected. Of course we know that not everyone is affected, that's why we check the logs and don't recommend replacement without evidence of a eMMC problem

before Tiramisu/Aroma was developed for the Wii U, pretty much nobody cared that the Nand chips were dying. [..]. Whereby... back then, users were more likely to “accidentally” brick their consoles by mishandling CBHC xD
Which might also just be a result of your bias, if you are more around people who mod their consoles you are more likely to meat someone which a CBHC brick. The same trap voultar fell for when he asked his followers for 160-0103 consoles. When I bought random consoles with that error off ebay, not one had a CBHC brick, but I got a few with bad eMMC. When some normal user who never modded his console hits that error, he gives Nintendo a call and if they replace it, like they did back then, you won't see it on a modding / homebrew oriented forum.
Also you migh remember the thread on wii-homebrew.com, where you already made a fool of yourself. Yeah I started that in 2020, before Tiramisu was a thing and Haxchi was state of the art. If you search the forums you will also find threads with symptoms of NAND corruption from years ago, before Tiramisu. Just back then no one really understood it or had a solution. You read muche more about it since we have an understanding of the problem and solutions.

Or rather, not to the extent that it's always overdramatized.
Maybe, we don't have statistics on it, do you? We know it's less than a third of the consoles as a high estimate (but probably a good portion lower), but other than that?

Therefore...an emunand is unnecessary for the wii u.
Good thing then that there is no emunand, on the Wii U we only have redNAND. But in case you mean redNAND, I guess there is a good bunch of people which surely have a different opinon about it

And what's more, the rednand on the wii u sucks
Interesting opinion
and is slow.
And just plain wrong. I mean you could argue that the Wii U is slow in general and therefore redNAND is also slow. But if you compare it the internal memory, redNAND is depending on the workload only very slightly faster or up to 2,70 times faster when installing game updates. (MLC only redirection with SCFM disabled, which is the most common and crypto disabled and a fast SD card). Of course you can make it slow, if you just find a slow enough sd card, or put it into 1 bit mode.

So I would be interesting where this statement comes from. I know it's not empirical evidence, so what does make you think it should be slower?


However, I never thought WiiU could reach full 25 MB/s reading speed from SD card.
I always thought it only supported early Class10 SD cards.
25MB/s is the theoretical maximum the bus can do. The same limit applies to the eMMC. That's 4 bit data mode at 50Mhz (it's more like 52Mhz, in reality)
 

The Real Jdbye

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I was mainly thinking of IOPS in regards to SSDs, something SD cards, flash drives and HDDs are all terrible at. Especially for games with a lot of small files (such as Zelda BotW) that can make a big difference. The top speed will still be capped, but in real world use, that matters most during downloads and large file transfers. For load times, IOPS matters more.
 
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lordelan

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If you find a HDD, which exposes 4k sectors (compared to the standard 512B) you could theoretically go up to 16TB. I connected a 10TB 4kn drive and formatted it. In the log I could see that it was detected and formatted with the full 10TB. The Data Management showd it only with 2TB tough, but NUSspli detected it with the full capacity.
Maybe I could make a plugin to emulate 4k sectors on a 512byte sector drive.
Wow seriously? Now THAT would be something!
And you are definitely talking about the Wii U and not the vWii here?
If I understood you correctly, I could already use something like a 5 TB drive, let the Wii U format it and use the full 5 TB although it would appear as only 2 TB in data management?
Given of course that I'd be able to achieve the 4k sectors thing (is that something that can be done with a partition tool or is it hard-locked on each drive so I'd have to be careful what to buy?).
And if you have multiple Wii Us in different locations you can take your system with you on the SD.
This is the one thing I thought was not possible as each redNAND could only be used on the Wii U it was created on. Not too sure about this but I think it is what I read a few times back then. This was many many years ago though.
People might want to have a NTFS partition as a real NTFS partition, so another way to mark the partition to use for WFS might be better, but not sure yet.
Haha, nice that you expected this question. :P
Why would someone want an NTFS partition on the Wii U + vWii though? All potentially big files (game images) can be split so FAT32 would still be recommended due to compatibility with the majority of the homebrews.
That being said: If a solution of you, that would allow a Wii U partition next to a vWii FAT32 partition, it's fine I guess to give the users the choice whether they want to use it or stay with any other setup so they can use NTFS whatsoever.
I don't really like using USB for the Wii U
I'm the opposite. While it's super sexy to have as much as possible just inside the Wii U shell (aka have everything just on the SD card), SD cards are more expensive than drives, are more vulnerable to heavy write cycles and die rather often than drives die.
At least I had so many cards dying on my already although I only stick to SanDisk and Samsung. Could be individual bad luck but who knows.
Thanks nonetheless for the very detailed answer, I really appreciate that. :)
 
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SDIO

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Wow seriously? Now THAT would be something!
And you are definitely talking about the Wii U and not the vWii here?
If I understood you correctly, I could already use something like a 5 TB drive, let the Wii U format it and use the full 5 TB although it would appear as only 2 TB in data management?
Given of course that I'd be able to achieve the 4k sectors thing (is that something that can be done with a partition tool or is it hard-locked on each drive so I'd have to be careful what to buy?).
The 4 sectors are a property of the drive. Many drives use 4k sectors internally but emulate 512 sectors externally for compatibility. You need a drive which exposes the 4k sectors to the host. I got a used server HDD for that from ebay, but it wasn't easy, as most offerings don't specify that. Had to understand the naming convection of the drives to see which ones have 4k sectors.
Also many NVMe support changing the sector size.
But I never filled the drive up beyond the 2TB, I only checked if it worked with a few games and that the OS internally sees the 10TB. And yes I speak about the Wii U.

This is the one thing I thought was not possible as each redNAND could only be used on the Wii U it was created on. Not too sure about this but I think it is what I read a few times back then. This was many many years ago though.
There are two ways of archiving that: when doing MLC only redirection, you just have to disable encryption for the MLC when you set it up. The problem with that is, that the games don't work if you don't also have the tickets installed on the other console.
The alternative is to do a full redirection of the SLCs and the MLC and OTP. The rednand in stroopwafel has a redOTP feature for that. Just put the otp of the source console named as redotp.bin on the SD and redNAND will use that. But vWii won't work with that. I maybe could make a mode where slccmpt isn't redirected and it uses the slccmpt key of the source console, but till now no one asked for it.


Haha, nice that you expected this question. :P
Why would someone want an NTFS partition on the Wii U + vWii though? All potentially big files (game images) can be split so FAT32 would still be recommended due to compatibility with the majority of the homebrews.
That being said: If a solution of you, that would allow a Wii U partition next to a vWii FAT32 partition, it's fine I guess to give the users the choice whether they want to use it or stay with any other setup so they can use NTFS whatsoever.
Maybe I also could just use the last Partition no matter of the FS, not sure yet.


At least I had so many cards dying on my already although I only stick to SanDisk and Samsung. Could be individual bad luck but who knows.
I also wouldn't blindly trust SanDisk. I also have some very old SDs from them that died. Also that they sell a portable SSD, which they know has a critical flaw, which makes it fail makes them not that trustworthy. With the Endurance cards at least I hope that they at least make there sure to use better flash, as you are paying a premium especially for that.
 

lordelan

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The 4 sectors are a property of the drive. Many drives use 4k sectors internally but emulate 512 sectors externally for compatibility. You need a drive which exposes the 4k sectors to the host. I got a used server HDD for that from ebay, but it wasn't easy, as most offerings don't specify that. Had to understand the naming convection of the drives to see which ones have 4k sectors.
Also many NVMe support changing the sector size.
But I never filled the drive up beyond the 2TB, I only checked if it worked with a few games and that the OS internally sees the 10TB. And yes I speak about the Wii U.


There are two ways of archiving that: when doing MLC only redirection, you just have to disable encryption for the MLC when you set it up. The problem with that is, that the games don't work if you don't also have the tickets installed on the other console.
The alternative is to do a full redirection of the SLCs and the MLC and OTP. The rednand in stroopwafel has a redOTP feature for that. Just put the otp of the source console named as redotp.bin on the SD and redNAND will use that. But vWii won't work with that. I maybe could make a mode where slccmpt isn't redirected and it uses the slccmpt key of the source console, but till now no one asked for it.



Maybe I also could just use the last Partition no matter of the FS, not sure yet.



I also wouldn't blindly trust SanDisk. I also have some very old SDs from them that died. Also that they sell a portable SSD, which they know has a critical flaw, which makes it fail makes them not that trustworthy. With the Endurance cards at least I hope that they at least make there sure to use better flash, as you are paying a premium especially for that.
Can't thank you enough for the detailed and promising reply, no matter if and what you make out of it for future updates or projects.
Also I've learned a lot more about the Wii U that I didn't know yet.
Really appreciated! :)
Don't know whether you're the right person to ask this but since this is something that's been asked like a thousand times on gbatemp already, I guess why not, so here's the question:
Do you think, something can be done about the max 300 title limit on the Wii U homescreen?
At least that'd be the other limitation apart from the 2 TB topic.
 

Blythe93

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It's recommended to align the Partitions on 64MiB boundaries and use a multiple of 64MiB for the size.
I've used the align partition option in the MiniTool Partition Wizard, but I'm not sure if it's possible to set it on 64MiB boundaries? All I've got was the message that everything was already aligned.

Fortunately, everything works as expected from what I can see. I've used a 128GB microSD card. It's not an endurance one for now, I'll move some of the games from my external HDD and do some testing before I commit to buying an endurance SD card. So far so good, thanks for another tutorial and really cool feature!
 

The Real Jdbye

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The 4 sectors are a property of the drive. Many drives use 4k sectors internally but emulate 512 sectors externally for compatibility. You need a drive which exposes the 4k sectors to the host. I got a used server HDD for that from ebay, but it wasn't easy, as most offerings don't specify that. Had to understand the naming convection of the drives to see which ones have 4k sectors.
Also many NVMe support changing the sector size.
But I never filled the drive up beyond the 2TB, I only checked if it worked with a few games and that the OS internally sees the 10TB. And yes I speak about the Wii U.


There are two ways of archiving that: when doing MLC only redirection, you just have to disable encryption for the MLC when you set it up. The problem with that is, that the games don't work if you don't also have the tickets installed on the other console.
The alternative is to do a full redirection of the SLCs and the MLC and OTP. The rednand in stroopwafel has a redOTP feature for that. Just put the otp of the source console named as redotp.bin on the SD and redNAND will use that. But vWii won't work with that. I maybe could make a mode where slccmpt isn't redirected and it uses the slccmpt key of the source console, but till now no one asked for it.



Maybe I also could just use the last Partition no matter of the FS, not sure yet.



I also wouldn't blindly trust SanDisk. I also have some very old SDs from them that died. Also that they sell a portable SSD, which they know has a critical flaw, which makes it fail makes them not that trustworthy. With the Endurance cards at least I hope that they at least make there sure to use better flash, as you are paying a premium especially for that.
"very old SDs"
Well there you go. You discovered that flash memory has a limited lifespan. The lower quality flash memory tends to go in SD cards and flash drives, regardless of brand, and it failing after years of use is not abnormal.
Now if you have a SD card fail within months, that would be a cause for concern. I had a Transcend SDHC card fail on me within 6 months one time, and it was only lightly used. I've had two SanDisk cards fail on me in the last 15 or so years of putting SD cards in everything I own (the majority of which were SanDisk with a few Samsung, and early on (pre-SDHC) a few Kingston), and they were both heavily used in smartphones/tablets with lots of apps stored on them, and they still lasted years. I don't think that's too bad at all.
 
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SDIO

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"very old SDs"
Well there you go. You discovered that flash memory has a limited lifespan.
Yes some 4GB sdcard that was even 10 years ago old and it looked like it just was the cheapest at the time.... Everything has a limited life span, I also have a stack of dead HDDs. I had a higher class 32GB Samsung card in my phone for years and ran Android from that, which is much heavier than everything the Wii U does, and that card still does well in a 3DS. With SD cards it can be hit or miss, especially with the cheaper ones. But compared to most cards the Endurance cards give actual numbers for what you can expect from them. Also you can get industrial cards (but the max endurance promise more TBW).
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I've used the align partition option in the MiniTool Partition Wizard, but I'm not sure if it's possible to set it on 64MiB boundaries? All I've got was the message that everything was already aligned.
By manually choosing the start inside the SD. But MB alignment is probably fine. If Wii VC games work, then everything should be fine.
 
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