Installing Voultar's NAND-AID as a preventative measure?

[pennywise134]

Hey All,

So my modded Wii U has the dreaded Hynix chip…luckily it hasn’t died yet but it's essentially a ticking time bomb at this point. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into setting it up the way I want it (with all the homebrew apps, games etc) and I would reeeeally hate for it to die on me, so I’m gonna attempt to install Voultar's NAND-AID as a preventative measure.

I see plenty of guides for how to install NAND-AID after a NAND failure, but none for doing it on a system that yet to fail.

Theoretically I’m thinking the process would look like this:

1. Backup my Wii U's NAND
2. Flash the NAND backup as an image on to a micro SD card
3. Then physically install the NAND-AID per the published guides

Is my thought process correct here, or is there something I’m missing?

Edit: I should also add that all my games and saves are stored on an external USB drive, not sure if this matters but I figured I'd throw it out there.

 

[SDIO]

Yes that would work. You just need to make sure to not boot between creating the backup and installing the SD.

But what makes you think your eMMC will fail, if it didn't fail yet and doesn't show any signs of failure? What is it's Manufacturing date? I mean NAND-AIDs are pretty cheap now with 3€ a piece, but you would still need an SD and invest a significant amount of time and work into it. And then who says the SD, which was not designed for this purpose will outlast the eMMC, which was designed for this use case? And you get the additonal risk of messing something up while installing it.
Not worth it in my opinion

 

[pennywise134]

Yes that would work. You just need to make sure to not boot between creating the backup and installing the SD.

But what makes you think your eMMC will fail, if it didn't fail yet and doesn't show any signs of failure? What is it's Manufacturing date? I mean NAND-AIDs are pretty cheap now with 3€ a piece, but you would still need an SD and invest a significant amount of time and work into it. And then who says the SD, which was not designed for this purpose will outlast the eMMC, which was designed for this use case? And you get the additonal risk of messing something up while installing it.
Not worth it in my opinion

you bring up some valid points. I was under the impression that consoles with a Hynix chip were essentially doomed...

Do we know what the odds of failure are with the Hynix chip yet? I understand that there's probably not a large enough sample size to truly estimate the odds.

 

[fvig2001]

Alternatively, you can just use the soft mod in the tutorials that use ishfax but you'll have to figure out a way to dump your NAND for the specs that it uses (I have only left them as clean). Hopefully someone makes a guide for it for people with good nand backups

Currently have done it for my US, Japanese and European (Hynix) wii us.

 

[pennywise134]

What is it's Manufacturing date?

Manufacture date is 07/2013

 

[CrazySquid]

Manufacture date is 07/2013

You will run into issues if you surpass the write/read cycles of the MLC chip, but even then it takes one whole year of being powered off (after that) to start corrupting data. I personally have a Samsung launch unit, have been heavily using the console for over 4 years (6 years of light use after that) and it works tha same as day one. Assuming your Hynix chip is not bad, you shouldn't run into issues. (Since your console hasn't show problems yet, I assume your console is from a good batch)

 

[pennywise134]

You will run into issues if you surpass the write/read cycles of the MLC chip, but even then it takes one whole year of being powered off (after that) to start corrupting data. I personally have a Samsung launch unit, have been heavily using the console for over 4 years (6 years of light use after that) and it works tha same as day one. Assuming your Hynix chip is not bad, you shouldn't run into issues. (Since your console hasn't show problems yet, I assume your console is from a good batch)

that's good to know! is there any way to check the integrity of my Hynix chip to see if there any signs of a future failure?

 

[SDIO]

That is pretty late, there is good chance the problem was already fixed by then.

You can run the MLC Checker from the reovery to see if there are any corrpted files and you can dump it to see if the eMMC reports any errors during that

 

[pennywise134]

That is pretty late, there is good chance the problem was already fixed by then.

You can run the MLC Checker from the reovery to see if there are any corrpted files and you can dump it to see if the eMMC reports any errors during that

is there a homebrew app that I can use to run MLC Checker? I don't have any experience with the recovery menu

 

[SDIO]

I don't think anyone has implemented that yet.