Hacking Games lagging even more with a better drive

[TheReduxPL]

Hello,
I have recently switched over my crappy 8GB no-name pendrive (write ~10 MB/s) to 500GB Verbatim Store'n'Go portable hard drive (write ~25 MB/s, faster with USB 3.0) and since then I seem to have problems with most games probably not keeping up with loading the data. In most cases this is represented by cutscenes being laggy but also it is more annoying in some other games like DJ Hero 2 where elements that are sliding down the vinyl (you know, the ones I need to press) are occasionally slowing down, therefore breaking my combo. I tried using USB Loader GX and Configurable USB Loader with CIOS 249, 222, 223 and 224 but the effect is every time the same. Surprisingly, the old pendrive I was using was performing better than the Verbatim drive I switched to, and that makes it even more interesting.
Any ideas? My CIOS's seem to be all up-to-date, checked with ModMii. My Wii is black and runs on software 4.3U. Drive is connected to the port closer to the edge. Drive is formatted to NTFS since I'm not using it just for loading Wii backups but also for storing big files from my PC. And sorry for my terrible English

 

[Foxi4]

Hello,
I have recently switched over my crappy 8GB no-name pendrive (write ~10 MB/s) to 500GB Verbatim Store'n'Go portable hard drive (write ~25 MB/s, faster with USB 3.0) and since then I seem to have problems with most games probably not keeping up with loading the data. In most cases this is represented by cutscenes being laggy but also it is more annoying in some other games like DJ Hero 2 where elements that are sliding down the vinyl (you know, the ones I need to press) are occasionally slowing down, therefore breaking my combo. I tried using USB Loader GX and Configurable USB Loader with CIOS 249, 222, 223 and 224 but the effect is every time the same. Surprisingly, the old pendrive I was using was performing better than the Verbatim drive I switched to, and that makes it even more interesting.
Any ideas? My CIOS's seem to be all up-to-date, checked with ModMii. My Wii is black and runs on software 4.3U. Drive is connected to the port closer to the edge. Drive is formatted to NTFS since I'm not using it just for loading Wii backups but also for storing big files from my PC. And sorry for my terrible English

I'm afraid that you'll have to switch to FAT32 - NTFS support is experimental at best and causes a lot of issues. You could also try using a different cable (make sure it's USB 2.0-compliant!). A sysCheck report would also be helpful in narrowing down the cause of your issues.

 

[TheReduxPL]

Thanks for your response!
Now when I remembered that I can partition that drive (...can I?), I might make two partitions and format one of them to FAT32 - that would be where I locate all the games. But since I have a lot of data already on it, it would take me a lot of time to do it so I would like to try it out when everything else fails.
I can't really try another cable because of that weird kind of port used by the drive (like there) - I just don't have any other cable that would fit there. I don't think it's defective since it's a new drive and it works flawlessly with any PC I used it with.
Here's the syscheck report:

• sysCheck.csv
• IOSsyscheck.log

PS: I used ModMii to softmod the console, if that's important.

 

[Porobu]

Thanks for your response!
Now when I remembered that I can partition that drive (...can I?), I might make two partitions and format one of them to FAT32 - that would be where I locate all the games. But since I have a lot of data already on it, it would take me a lot of time to do it so I would like to try it out when everything else fails.
I can't really try another cable because of that weird kind of port used by the drive (like there) - I just don't have any other cable that would fit there. I don't think it's defective since it's a new drive and it works flawlessly with any PC I used it with.
Here's the syscheck report:

• sysCheck.csv
• IOSsyscheck.log

PS: I used ModMii to softmod the console, if that's important.

The cable in that is a microUSB 3.0 cable, so its a really stansard cable

 

[TheReduxPL]

The cable in that is a microUSB 3.0 cable, so its a really stansard cable

Oh, I am not owning any other device that works on USB 3.0 so I did not recognize it.
Also I will actually try now to make a separate FAT32 partition. Can I just copy-paste the "wbfs" folder to the another partition?

 

[Porobu]

Oh, I am not owning any other device that works on USB 3.0 so I did not recognize it.

Try plugging a microUSB 2.0 cable to the HDD and to the wii and see if it works better. Wiis dont support USB3.0 really well

 

[TheReduxPL]

Try plugging a microUSB 2.0 cable to the HDD and to the wii and see if it works better. Wiis dont support USB3.0 really well

Thanks for a tip but it didn't really help, issues are still appearing.

Also for some reason I am unable to format the another partition to FAT32 (I split out 100 gigs from the original partition) - it only allows me to format it to exFAT and NTFS. Any external formatting tool I tried (Verbatim Hard Drive Formatter, HP USB Disk Storage Formatter and SmartDisk FAT32 Tool) won't let me to do it either, only lets me format both partitions... Maybe I should try GParted? Sorted it out, AOMEI did the trick. Now I'm copying all the backups to the FAT32 partition and I will let you know about the results. Thanks for helping!
If I may ask - what is the best USB loader you would recommend? From what I have noticed, many people recommend CFG USB Loader but it wasn't updated for a long time, wouldn't that impact the compatibility?

 

[TheReduxPL]

Made the FAT32 partition and moved over my games there. Games are still laggy. So it's not the problem of my filesystem.
I pretty much wasted about 1.5 hours because of that

 

[Foxi4]

Made the FAT32 partition and moved over my games there. Games are still laggy. So it's not the problem of my filesystem. I pretty much wasted about 1.5 hours because of that

It's still more beneficial, the compatibility is far higher, you'd run into issues sooner or later. Have you tried using different loaders? I personally enjoy CFGLoader, it's better than GX in my experience. Your cIOS'es seem to be in order, have you tried booting the games with different cIOS'es or did you always choose the default one? Try using Hermes with the troublesome games and report on the results.

 

[TheReduxPL]

It's still more beneficial, the compatibility is far higher, you'd run into issues sooner or later. Have you tried using different loaders? I personally enjoy CFGLoader, it's better than GX in my experience. Your cIOS'es seem to be in order, have you tried booting the games with different cIOS'es or did you always choose the default one? Try using Hermes with the troublesome games and report on the results.

I am just going to try all the launchers I have (CFG, WiiFlow, GX - sth else?) and try out the available CIOS's. Which ones should I try? 222-224+249 or just all of them?

 

[Foxi4]

I suggest trying out all of your cIOS'es. Technically the default ones should work fine, but it doesn't hurt to try. I'd also try using a different USB cable if you have the option.

 

[TheReduxPL]

Okay, I will update this post to let you know about the results.

- CFG USB Loader: 222-mload, 223-mload, 224-mload, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250 - all of those are causing lag issues; 222-yal and 223-yal are not working ("set_frag: -128", "ERROR: SetWBFS: -128")
- GX: Same as with CFG + 202 throws me back to HBC and 251 freezes the console right before the intro
- WiiFlow: this loader doesn't even show most of my games including WarioWare, it only shows three when there are 15 games on this drive.

I am testing these by running WarioWare Smooth Moves and checking if the intro is lagging.
Tried 3 different cables aside from the USB 3.0 one.
Also noticed random freezes in USB Loader GX on "Initialize usb device", not seem to happen with CFG.
Something else you could suggest?

And I'd really like if I could easily get back to HBC directly from the game. And that my controller won't turn off every time I start up anything from HBC or from the USB loader. Finally I wish that console wouldn't be as problematic as it turns out to be. I wish too much...

 

[Foxi4]

That's pretty odd. If the USB stick works fine with no slowdown and the HDD has issues then chances are that it's just the drive's fault and there's little you can do about it. Perhaps there are some firmware updates available for the drive?

 

[TheReduxPL]

USB stick works fine even despite the fact it's not just low-end, but it's "given-away-on-every-public-event-end". You know the drill But it's way too small for my needs, that is one of the reasons why I bought this drive, I even checked the USB Devices Compatibility list and it's present there. I am slightly disappointed with the fact that like 2-3 times faster hard drive works worse than a cheap-ass pendrive!
I am already tired after trying all of those cIOS and loaders combinations... Do you Foxi know any possible way to make this console work reasonably with my drive? Does anyone else know? Please, you are pretty much my last hope

 

[Foxi4]

USB stick works fine even despite the fact it's not just low-end, but it's "given-away-on-every-public-event-end". You know the drill But it's way too small for my needs, that is one of the reasons why I bought this drive, I even checked the USB Devices Compatibility list and it's present there. I am slightly disappointed with the fact that like 2-3 times faster hard drive works worse than a cheap-ass pendrive! I am already tired after trying all of those cIOS and loaders combinations... Do you Foxi know any possible way to make this console work reasonably with my drive? Does anyone else know? Please, you are pretty much my last hope

You can always try re-modding the system from scratch, but I don't see why you'd need to, I haven't noticed anything unusual in your sysCheck log. Transfer rates are not always a good measurement of how the drive will perform in a non-PC environment, there's a variety of factors that can slow it down when it's not working in an environment it was designed to work with.

 

[TheReduxPL]

It was already re-modded so yeah, none of that. Also I see what do you mean, HDDs and flash drives are different. I am still hopeful that someone will find out how to fix this...
Thank you for assistance anyway. At least we tried

 

[Sky Design]

So by slow downs, do you mean framerates plummet? Cause in my case the the frames drop much like a pc when the screen gets very heavy with activity, thus creating a slowdown. I've already made a topic on that which no one seems to

1. Not care about
or
2. Just don't know the answer or I did something that violates the ToR.

If you get better performance with the usb drive, would it be worth checking out on a sd card then maybe? And to already cap on what he mentioned the whole reason I think most of us get HDD's are because of space. I only had the SD card and a month later got a HDD.

 

[Foxi4]

I'm assuming that he means slowdown during streamed segments (hence his DJ Hero problems), this does affect some HDD's that have low read speeds during "spin-up" and accelerate later. Most games load their resources prior to launching a given segment, but some rely on streaming content, for instance music, and in those cases access time is critical. This is why sometimes even overall slower flash devices ultimately have faster immediate access time when compared to HDD's. You can somewhat lessen this problem by defragmenting the drive thoroughly and making sure that the files are close to the beginning of the spindle by creating the Wii partition first.

 

[TarkinMX]

I saw mention of doing a syscheck but you haven't done so. Can you do that so we can see what you have for your cIOSes? Also, I apologize if this was mentioned because I only skimmed through but is your FAT32 partition the first or second? I seem to remember reading somewhere that it's beneficial to have it as the first partition.

 

[Foxi4]

I saw mention of doing a syscheck but you haven't done so.

Yes he has.

http://gbatemp.net/threads/games-lagging-even-more-with-a-better-drive.372676/#post-5124943