Homebrew Wii HDD Format Help

TailsPrower07 · Apr 19, 2019

So I was going to format the HDD that I bought a few days ago for my Wii (WD 320GB My Passport Essential) to FAT32 and noticed the "Cluster size" column (using Wii Backup Manager to format). I've heard that 32kb is good for it but I've also saw that 64kb will also work. So which one works better? Is there any advantages one has over another? Want to know before I jump the gun on it.

StrayGuitarist · Apr 19, 2019

Cluster size? When trying to format a drive on WBM for me, I see a tab labeled "Sector Size", and the window looks like this.

When formatting my drive, I just chose "Physical sector size", and it ended up working perfectly, do you have that option on yours?

CMDreamer · Apr 19, 2019

Using a 64K cluster size, means the files will use less clusters to be saved on the hard drive and less I/O operations would had to be done to acces their data.

When we know what kind of information we will save on a hard drive we can decide better what cluster size to use. For the most common user, a 32K cluster size is fine, but when you plan to save huge files a higher cluster size takes advantage of the hard drive space in a better way.

TailsPrower07 · Apr 19, 2019

CMDreamer said:
Using a 64K cluster size, means the files will use less clusters to be saved on the hard drive and less I/O operations would had to be done to acces their data.

When we know what kind of information we will save on a hard drive we can decide better what cluster size to use. For the most common user, a 32K cluster size is fine, but when you plan to save huge files a higher cluster size takes advantage of the hard drive space in a better way.

So, 64k seems to be the way to go?

Illuminaticy · Apr 19, 2019

TailsPrower07 said:
So I was going to format the HDD that I bought a few days ago for my Wii (WD 320GB My Passport Essential) to FAT32 and noticed the "Cluster size" column (using Wii Backup Manager to format).

Using Wii Backup Manager will format the drive to WBFS, not FAT32.
You need to use a tool like guiformat to achieve FAT32.
Select 32kb (32786) allocation unit size, overall better performance (I don't know exactly what the difference is, but 32k is better for Wii)

edit: turns out you can format it to FAT32 with WBM, learned something new today lol
either way- 32k is the recommended way for Wii

TailsPrower07 · Apr 19, 2019

StrayGuitarist said:
Cluster size? When trying to format a drive on WBM for me, I see a tab labeled "Sector Size", and the window looks like this.

When formatting my drive, I just chose "Physical sector size", and it ended up working perfectly, do you have that option on yours?

That's because you have you have the drive formatted at WBFS, not FAT32. Formatting to FAT32 will show the "Cluster size" instead of "Sector size"

StrayGuitarist · Apr 19, 2019

TailsPrower07 said:
That's because you have you have the drive formatted at WBFS, not FAT32. Formatting to FAT32 will show the "Cluster size" instead of "Sector size"

Oops, my bad. Sorry about that.

Homebrew Wii HDD Format Help

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