So I stumbled upon the following hidden Wii U menu option to turn off power-save mode on the external drive. In the copy/move/delete data settings, move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen. Then press down (on the d-pad) as well as start and select simultaneously and hold all three buttons. A power-save screen will then pop up, allowing one to enable/disable the USB power save feature.
My question is, could this be the reason that a drive will seemingly work and then suddenly stop working when it does not have its own power supply? That is, the Wii U puts its USB port into power saving mode and the drive stops working properly. With an external drive that has its own power supply, this should not be a problem. What got me to wonder about this was my attempt to copy my 250GB external HDD (A/C powered) to a 256GB USB flash drive. Only a few minutes into the copy process, I saw the black screen that shows up when you "unplug" a USB device (namely, external storage). I will try the copy process again and report back any findings. In the meantime, if someone has already tested external drives with power-save turned off, I would definitely appreciate some info so I do not end up wasting more time doing something that has already been done.
My question is, could this be the reason that a drive will seemingly work and then suddenly stop working when it does not have its own power supply? That is, the Wii U puts its USB port into power saving mode and the drive stops working properly. With an external drive that has its own power supply, this should not be a problem. What got me to wonder about this was my attempt to copy my 250GB external HDD (A/C powered) to a 256GB USB flash drive. Only a few minutes into the copy process, I saw the black screen that shows up when you "unplug" a USB device (namely, external storage). I will try the copy process again and report back any findings. In the meantime, if someone has already tested external drives with power-save turned off, I would definitely appreciate some info so I do not end up wasting more time doing something that has already been done.
Last edited by rs1n,
