thank you for taking the time to give me an amazon link! It sounds great buts it's way over my budget, I wonder if 64GB one is compatible the 32GB one seems to have issues

 

I guess it's not a bad idea, I have an old 2.5 enclosure, I'll see if I can find an old laptop with a working hard drive, do you know if Y cables pose problems if I plug them on the two USB ports

 

If it's the same as putting them on USB or with wii backup manager I'll figure it out, thanks a lot for the advice alexander

 

If you want USB Flash Drives, I've been using USB Flash drives from Toshiba such as this one and a Data Traveler G4 from Kingston, and they've served me well, and I've been using them for years so I can recommend them.

I've tried 16GB, 32GB, and 64 GB Toshiba drives and all of them worked the same (besides storage capacity, of course). I tried other brands such as Integral and Sandisk successfully too (I replayed Xenoblade Chronicles in its entirety on the Integral one, even, and that's dozens of hours of use to find problems if they existed). I think as long as you don't use crappy sticks and go for some respectably produced ones, it should go fine, but apparently they're the worst thing of this planet for some.

With the pass of the years External HDDs are getting more economic, smaller and way less annoying which is pretty great, but they're not the perfect solution. As far as I know, Flash Memory will pretty much always be faster than a HDD, and Flash does not suffer fragmentation, for example. HDDs can also suffer a plethora of issues too, you only need to spend a few minutes either in these forums or reddit to see.

But if you end up going with an HDD, I've read the Seagate Backup Plus works well on several places, I've seen the 1TB model around 60 € (although I've seen it sometimes for 40). Another model I've read people recommending is the WD My Passport, which should have comparable price to the Seagate, and they look rather cute. I'd recommend waiting for other users' input on specific models, though.

On a personal note, to me 1tb for Wii/GC games is overkill (and not the fun kind). I hardly believe most people will have end up filling even a quarter of that, and you'll have to endure long loading times whenever you enter a USB Loader. A friend's set up takes like around half a minute to load and go to USB Loader GX proper, and that adds up quickly when you're with friends and want to play a variety of games.

 

I used many thumb drives and always worked fine (i prefer using them instead of a hard disk because they are easier to carry around. My Xbox One and Wii U do have external hard drives because not only the games are bigger, but I dont carry them as often tio play with friends as the Wii), not using it to save stuff such as emunand.
I bought one Kingston DT50 32gb to keep some games and other Sandisk Cruzer 32GB for party games.
The Kingston one is newer, the problem with it is that many drives nowadays, especially USB 3.0 ones have its table of partitions as GPT and the Wii and many devices will not read out of the box.The Wii and many devices will not read drives with GPT table of partitions, only MBR.
In this case, you have to erase all partitions, format using MBR and then you format the drive as a FAT32 or NTFS partition. The thing I recommend the most is using gparted which is found on many Linux distros and clicking on the option to recreate the partition table as msdos. On Windows you can do this using the MiniTool Partition Wizard and clicking with the right button of the mouse and it will appear a option to convert to a MBR drive.