Hacking Information about 4.0 update

[eric_4_life]

After using Waninkoko's firmware updater, I can safely say that it is not worth update for several reasons.

1. You WILL lose ALL brick protection and preloader will corrupt your Wii.

2. The update will delete game wads you have not purchased, so you will need to reinstall them.

3. The SD booter requires space on your nand and it is nothing special if you already have the wad manager.

So all in all, the only reason people should update, is if you absolutely do not want to uninstall and reinstall wads through the wad manager, want to be able to use an SDHC in the system menu, and do not care about possible bricking.

 

[MrBubbles]

preloader will corrupt your Wii.

Hm...?

 

[eric_4_life]

Well, from personnal experience, installing preloader on 4.0 (it will not remain on your Wii with the update)
the system menu becomes corrupted

 

[Tetsuo Shima]

What about shorter NAND life? Is it true?

 

[eric_4_life]

probably not^

 

[Jacobeian]

1. You WILL lose ALL brick protection and preloader will corrupt your Wii.

preloader was a very limited brick protection and i am not sure why preloader couldn't be installed (be sure NOT to use any hacks though, the main feature of booting stuff before the system menu "should" be fine)

2. The update will delete game wads you have not purchased, so you will need to reinstall them.
this has not been confirmed, many people said that all their pirated channels was still there
the HBC is not deleted, why would they removed some fakesigned channels and not some othjers ? your Wii IA is not so advanced
and even if they are deleted, you can still reinstall them, this is not really a big pain

QUOTE

The SD booter requires space on your nand and it is nothing special if you already have the wad manager.

have you tried it ? this takes MUCH LESS time than deleting/installing/reseting with WAD Manager
the space required on your NAND is a temporary space, which means you only need minimal space for ONE channel

I don't understand people: they are moaning because there isn't enough space and they can't load stuff from SD and when it becomes possible, they are moaning because it copy to NAND first... btw, reading stuff from SD constantly during channel execution would be damn slower than readging from NAND, this is probably why they choose this way

 

[ddp127]

i dont think so, why would ninty make a update that short your NAND's life, then they have to repair more wii's

 

[MrBubbles]

HackMii fellow said the constant stress of writing and deleting the NAND will cause the life span to decrease.

 

[phertiker]

probably not^

yes it will. flash memory has a limited lifetime with regards to write cycles. 100,000 writes, etc. With this new "feature" of launching VC and Wiiware from SD, means that every time you fire up a game from SD it "writes" the game to the Wii NAND, you play the game, then it deletes it (whether or not it actually does a write to delete the data, who knows, but that's another potential write).

So yeah, it will reduce the life of your Wii NAND.

 

[eric_4_life]

Some of my homebrew channels and ALL my VC/WiiWare were deleted with the update. This is probably due to the relocation and update the base channels (eg: Mii, weather, news and shop)

Also, I'm not saying the SD booter isn't a good thing, it's just that by installing it lose disc channel backup loading (essential for Rock band DLC), CSM and brick protection.

So for the time being, the update IS NOT WORTH IT

BTW, MrBubbles, the NAND life spand may decrease, but it is not noticeable right now, and probably won't be for a few years.

 

[Tetsuo Shima]

AFAIK, NAND is a flash memory. So it has a large but limited amount of writes... if this new SD launching feature copies and deletes a game to NAND every time, the number of write-erase-cycles will increase much more than before, reaching that limit faster.

 

[spawn844]

I dont use cisocorp, nor preloader or anything like that. i just use emulators, play isos and use wadmanager. Thats it, should i update sence i dont use any of that fancy stuff?

 

[eric_4_life]

^I do not recommend it since you have no brick protection

 

[spawn844]

Ok then other then the things i said and brick protection. i'm good to go

 

[wiiNinja]

AFAIK, NAND is a flash memory. So it has a large but limited amount of writes... if this new SD launching feature copies and deletes a game to NAND every time, the number of write-erase-cycles will increase much more than before, reaching that limit faster.

This is true, but typical number of write/erase cycles for modern flash devices is 100,000. So practically, these devices will last:

273 years if you write once a day
136 years if you write twice a day
68 years if you write 4 times a day
34 years if you write 8 times a day
17 years if you write 16 times a day

Do people normally play games more than 16 times a day? And does anyone expect your Wii to last more than 17 years?

 

[Tetsuo Shima]

Thanks for the examples.

So, not much to worry about... but I think that you should consider that writes in the NAND also happen more frequently for us homebrewers, with all those cIOS/channels installs. Also, saves are written in the NAND.

 

[noobwarrior7]

100,000 is a theoretical amount used to define the amount of times a flash device can be written to. Individual blocks of flash memory do not nearly each meet such a standard. Eventually low-level corruption can occur. Regardless, and equally important and more likely problem is wear- and -tear on the sd card reader itself...not fun or easy to replace for noobs.