Hardware External drive questions

[Exatron]

I've been going through the process of modernizing all my game consoles for a while now. With Black Friday coming up, I think finally getting a good external drive for my Wii is my next target. I've been having trouble finding good, reliable information on what drives will work well with a Wii though, so I was hoping to ask some questions so I can sort through the deals available next month and make a good purchase.

I've been trying to research USB storage, and I think I understand the following, but would appreciate confirmation and/or corrections for any of this:

• I want to use either an HDD or SSD, not any sort of flash drive.
• The drive should be formatted for FAT32, ideally with a 32k allocation unit size. Other sizes may cause various compatibility issues for some software.
• To use a drive larger than 2TB while keeping 32k clusters, I should use a drive with a 4k logical sector size.

On to my main questions:

My goal is to have a complete 1G1R Wii set. All US games, any European games that didn't have a US release, and then any remaining Japanese games. I'm not concerned with GameCube or VC games. I'll take a look at homebrew eventually, but I'm mainly focused on just the released Wii and WiiWare games. Does anyone know roughly how big of a drive I would need for this? I've seen reference to using a 5TB drive to have everything, but I'm not clear how that compares with my game selection.

I'm aware of the WD tool that allows switching between 512 and 4k logical sectors, but I've seen some complaints that some newer WD firmwares no longer support that tool. Anyone know if there are any particular HDDs that I can be confident will still support it?

I've seen some indications that many SSDs support 4k logical sectors. I honestly prefer SSDs anyway just for durability and reliability reasons. Is there any way to find what SSDs use 4k sectors, or is it safe to assume an SSD would use 4k? It's not something I've seen advertised for any of the drives I've looked at. Any particular recommendations for drives to watch for? I normally lean toward WD or Crucial.

I believe I read that 4k sectors and 32k clusters allow you to use a drive up to 4TB. Anything larger would require 64k clusters, which could then result in some compatibility issues. Is that all accurate?

Finally, are there any other considerations I didn't mention and might be overlooking?

 

[EchoStorm]

Its been a VERY long while since I did mine and for many many reasons I cannot remember, I decided on a 4TB WD Red, which was pretty new at the time. A modern Equivalent looks to be the WD Black p10 4TB. I had also heard a drive over 4tb quickly caused data corruption but this was some time ago.
Hard Drive

 

[morning_glory]

Tally up your games to see how big storage you will need.
Scrubbed wbfs files are smaller than direct ISO rips = Less space used

Me ? I would prefer to use 2X 2tb HDDs, but that's only due to the uncertainty of technology these days. Swapping devices isn't such a big deal
Also make sure you take the power consumption of you USB device under consideration. Y cables may have to used if the Wii cannot provide enough power through a single USB port.