Hardware Can you make a Wii U Partition?

Taleweaver

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Somewhere in this lenghty video, they try some USB-sticks.

Summary:
-when inserting an already formatted USB drive (with data on it), the wiiU asks if you want to format it.
-a wii u formatted drive cannot natively be read by either an ipad or a windows PC.

This wasn't an extensive test, so there weren't tries of partitioning shenanigans. It's probably worth noting that formatting goes pretty quickly, so it's "just" the partitioning table that gets rearranged (not that this DOESN'T mean your data is completely gone, obviously).

There's no doubt more to be mentioned but I don't know it yet. But it would surprise me if there won't be tools coming out to allow to put data on the thing (after all, there were commercials of you showing your vacation photos. That would be hard to pull off if you can't put the damn JPG's on them in the first place).
edit: skip the last remark. Forgot about that SD-slut. I mean slot.
 

porkiewpyne

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Hmm I wonder if there is any un-format option if I want to use my HDD for other purposes (and not for the WiiU ever again). Or would I just format it straight from the PC?
 
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Hmm I wonder if there is any un-format option if I want to use my HDD for other purposes (and not for the WiiU ever again). Or would I just format it straight from the PC?

Un.. format? It's called format. Again. Windows (or any other OS) will recognize the HDD, but tells you it's unable to read it and prompts you to format it or let it be.

Of course you will lose all your WiiU-data if you choose to format. Again.
 
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Cyan

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they said (I read/heard, don't remember who said it) the SD card can't be used by the wiiU.

If the HDD still use MBR/GPT, then the table can't be encrypted, so the partition information could be altered after the console created it (resized?, adding new partition after the WiiU partition? copied from one to another HDD?)
unless they are using drive without a partition table.
 

Eerpow

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they said (I read/heard, don't remember who said it) the SD card can't be used by the wiiU.

If the HDD still use MBR/GTP, it can't be encrypted, so the partition information could be altered once the console created it (resized, adding new partition after the WiiU partition? copied from one to another HDD?)
unless they are using drive without a partition table.
That's only for retail games you get at the eShop, SD cards can be used for anything except for that. And it's not Nintendo's fault why this isn't possible.

Here's why.
It's because of read and write speeds, the Wii U reads disks at 22.5 MB/s or 150x, which is incredibly fast. There's no way SD cards will reach that, class 10 is only 10MB/s. A harddrive however can reach the required speed with ease.
For reference the PS3's disk media are read at 9MB/s.
 
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McHaggis

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It's mostly because of read and write speeds, the Wii U reads disks at 22.5 MB/s or 150x, which is incredibly fast. There's no way SD cards will reach that, class 10 is only 10MB/s. A harddrive can reach the required speed with ease.
For reference the PS3's disk media are read at 9MB/s.
uh... Class 10 (or 10MB/s) refers to the write speed. SD read speeds can go upto 200x (~30MB/s). UHS (Ultra High Speed) cards can go even higher.

EDIT: I should go on to say that the probable reason is that formatting the card with a proprietary format may have resulted in awkwardness when it comes to saving things like images to SD card to transfer to a computer (a la Wii's photo channel). Games loaded from the SD card would not be able to take advantage of the SD card slot for interoperable uses.
 
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Eerpow

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uh... Class 10 (or 10MB/s) refers to the write speed. SD read speeds can go upto 200x (~30MB/s).

EDIT: I should go on to say that the probable reason is that formatting the card with a proprietary format may have resulted in awkwardness when it comes to saving things like images to SD card to transfer to a computer (a la Wii's photo channel). Games loaded from the SD card would not be able to take advantage of the SD card slot for interoperable uses.
True, thanks for pointing that out, though speed is still the reason why they can't support it. HDD are always faster and Nintendo can't guarantee SD card support as most cards won't read that fast. class 10 often reach read speeds at 20 or below , plus current card readers are limited to 20 MB/s. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sdhc-memory-card,2143-10.html
 

McHaggis

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True, thanks for pointing that out, though speed is still the reason why they can't support it. HDD are always faster and Nintendo can't guarantee SD card support as most cards won't read that fast. class 10 often reach read speeds at 20 or below , plus current card readers are limited to 20 MB/s. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sdhc-memory-card,2143-10.html
You raise a valid point, but the article you linked to is almost 4 years old. Though you are correct that USB hard drives have faster read and write speeds than most SD cards, you'll see in this more up-to-date article that many current cards average at over 23MB/s read (faster than the Wii U's BD-ROM drive). I agree that they would be wary of this as games run from slower SD cards may experience problems in comparison to those run form disc or USB.

If Nintendo had wanted to allow games to be run from SD, they could have either benchmarked the inserted SD card before formatting or made UHS cards a requirement. As far as I can tell, though, there's no mention of SDXC support, which would limit us to 32GB... not too great when you need to download some 16GB games.

I guess all these factors could have contributed to the decision not to include support for loading games from SD cards.
 
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hergipotter

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As long as the WiiU console is the only "tool" which lets you format an hdd in the WiiU's format and as long as this is only possible for the whole hdd I guess there is no way to find out...
 

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