Hardware How long will our wii's NAND flash keep working?

[Archerite]

While I have many crazy ideas and even more unfinished projects to work on....one of them involves the NAND flash chip inside the Wii. What I know is that it's 512MB with ECC error correction and it uses a pretty much standard pinout on an 8bit databus. As far as I can tell the NAND chip itself is not involved in any of the protection and encryption and all of that is pure software. Right? A brick that is feared and warned about a lot when modifying the NAND is mostly about corrupting the filesystem or settings that prevent the Wii from booting. But what if the NAND chip itself dies and starts corrupting data? Does this mean that Wii is dead forever?

My idea is to figure out a way to replace the NAND chip with something that is more easily replaceable. I know EmuNAND is an option and I still need to figure out how this works but that's another story. In terms of RAW storage I see the NAND chip as a place to store data that happens to have build in ECC to correct errors. If some device would respond in the same way as a NAND chip to the commands to read/write data to some external storage where you provide it with an encrypted backup image made earlier for that particular Wii...would it work? Has this ever been tried at all?
I have many even more crazy ideas if the NAND could be emulated with an external RAM DISK in some way. Unlimited testing of weird stuff and 100% brick proof against everything!! Except maybe lost gamesaves stored in that RAM disk when the power goes out . The emulation device would have to be either a really fast micro controller or an FPGA to respond fast enough! Or maybe even a combination of them to load data into the RAM disk from an SD card or something.

What I am most worried about is the expected data retention for the NAND flash chips specified as "only" 10 years which is less than the age of most Wii's by now. How long will they keep working even if you do not install ANY mods at all? It can just die on you at some point without you doing anything wrong at all! And not even from writing to the same part to much but just by age! It's very possible I have misunderstood a lot of the information about Flash chips, SD cards and SSD's ofcourse and I really hope that is the case.

If I would ever start a NAND emulator project that would be in another thread, although hearing the thoughts about it is nice ofcourse. This thread is only meant for discussing the possibility of the NAND chip dying from age and not normal usage.

 

[Ryccardo]

But what if the NAND chip itself dies and starts corrupting data? Does this mean that Wii is dead forever?

Depends of course on what gets lost as a result of corruption - I have one console which developed bad sectors (you can identify them by creating a backup with BootMii, the description will be different than "factory bad block marker") and nothing was lost since it was over empty space

Yes, you can replace the nand as long as you flash a full backup on the replacement (even more flexibility allowed if your console supports bootmii as boot2, then you only need the first 8 sectors or so to be programmed externally)

If you're this paranoid yet fine with clunky and imperfect implementations, Sneek emunand has been a thing for years - but replacement hardware (nands or whole consoles) are more than readily available

 

[Archerite]

I may have exaggerated a little for dramatic effect . I am not really afraid my wii's start dying on me since I have about eight of them already! but that was the only way to make a "nand hardware emulator" sounds sort of reasonable to start looking at. Only 2 of them support the Bootmii as boot2 option actually and it indeed makes a lot more possible in preventing bricks or redirecting stuff to SD or USB. And like you said the impact of a bad NAND block depends a lot on what part is corrupted.

Replacement consoles are indeed cheap and that is why I already have collected 8...and trying to keep it below that unless I blow stuff up beyond repair! It would be fun to try and swap a NAND some day just to see for myself if it will still boot from an earlier backup. But if this is possible then one of my questions is answered, the NAND chip is not part of the security of the Wii directly.