So I've determined that my external hard drive is slowly starting to die. It's plugged in with a Y-cable and it's been on pretty damn constantly for years (I rarely turn the Wii U off, not entirely sure why, I just like being able to lift the Gamepad off it's charging dock and immediately be looking at the main menu with the many games you can pick up and play).
Problem is, I've now noticeably seen how over all this time and treatment of the drive that when I start a game, it takes a loooong time to load up now when it didn't before and in-game loading time is no better, things that took mere seconds in the past were now taking a minute or two to load, like an individual level in DKC Tropical Freeze.
Testing if it were the hard drive, I moved a couple of games from the hard drive to the system menu, and the change in load times for those games were immediately obvious, things that were taking a minute to load on the hard drive were loading near instantly once moved to the system memory.
I'm happy I could figure out where the issue lies, but the problem now is because the drive is dying as it is, moving an individual game through the settings to the system memory or presumably a second drive, takes forever. Like I think it took 2 hours to move a 3GB game from the hard drive to the system memory. I have a lot of games and many of them are much larger than 3GB, so I think I'd honestly be looking at like many days, maybe even a couple of weeks of leaving the Wii U on with 2 drives connected and hoping that the power never surges or anything like that for it all to copy over. I mean worst case scenario, I can do this, but I'd be sad to not be able to use my Wii U for so long in the meantime by going this route.
And so I'm wondering, now that we have new tools that can make an SD card usable for Wii U titles or the ability to have multiple partitions on Wii U formatted USB drives now, do we have, say, the capability to transfer Wii U games between hard drives through a PC instead? I get the feeling this would be much faster for me and I could still use my Wii U in that time for titles on the system menu.
Problem is, I've now noticeably seen how over all this time and treatment of the drive that when I start a game, it takes a loooong time to load up now when it didn't before and in-game loading time is no better, things that took mere seconds in the past were now taking a minute or two to load, like an individual level in DKC Tropical Freeze.
Testing if it were the hard drive, I moved a couple of games from the hard drive to the system menu, and the change in load times for those games were immediately obvious, things that were taking a minute to load on the hard drive were loading near instantly once moved to the system memory.
I'm happy I could figure out where the issue lies, but the problem now is because the drive is dying as it is, moving an individual game through the settings to the system memory or presumably a second drive, takes forever. Like I think it took 2 hours to move a 3GB game from the hard drive to the system memory. I have a lot of games and many of them are much larger than 3GB, so I think I'd honestly be looking at like many days, maybe even a couple of weeks of leaving the Wii U on with 2 drives connected and hoping that the power never surges or anything like that for it all to copy over. I mean worst case scenario, I can do this, but I'd be sad to not be able to use my Wii U for so long in the meantime by going this route.
And so I'm wondering, now that we have new tools that can make an SD card usable for Wii U titles or the ability to have multiple partitions on Wii U formatted USB drives now, do we have, say, the capability to transfer Wii U games between hard drives through a PC instead? I get the feeling this would be much faster for me and I could still use my Wii U in that time for titles on the system menu.
