Nintendo Wii U NAND Vulnerable To Dying If Not Powered On Often

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Dyhr

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Apparently this has been a common issue (though usually undetermined failure) over the years, with some reports and speculation on the cause on this site I see, as well. Most would assume age killed the console, or that it was on its way out before being put in storage. Over the years it doesn't seem like anyone here, on Reddit, or elsewhere, knew what the cause was.

https://exputer.com/news/wii-u-memory-error-long-period/

Well, it's due to the NAND chip dying. The most common cause is not being powered on often enough.
Worst part? Even if you had the tools and the know-how to swap out that NAND chip... There's a report on Reddit that the NAND is actually "married to the console". Yes, you read that right. The system already plagued with more hardware pairing and DRM than an Apple device might have the NAND bonded to each console.

To be fair I am not sure where that is coming from. There is a thread on this site of someone replacing the eMMC with an SD card and it working, although with much trouble. It could be that an actual eMMC replacement does not work but other methods, like his use of an SD card, do.

I'm a massive advocate of right-to-repair and in general cutting down on e-waste. Electronics will be around long after we aren't. I've disliked the Wii U immensely ever since it came out and we knew how awfully the tablet was handled (that it's bonded to the console with no replacing it or anything about it without getting a new console). This is just disgusting.
 

realtimesave

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I have since backed up all 3 of my system's NANDs. Finished it up yesterday. Now I wonder how can one go about disaster recovery? I mean if the system bricks, how would you be able to take the NAND backup and restore it so that the system will work again. Fortunately, none of the 3 that I own have any issues.
 

Dyhr

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I have since backed up all 3 of my system's NANDs. Finished it up yesterday. Now I wonder how can one go about disaster recovery? I mean if the system bricks, how would you be able to take the NAND backup and restore it so that the system will work again. Fortunately, none of the 3 that I own have any issues.
So it sounds like the NAND doesn't even die properly.
If the MLC NAND corrupts but is otherwise functional, and the SLC NAND works, you can restore a NAND backup. Of course, only one paired to that device (the one you made), because the Apple Wii U can't accept literally anything other than what it ships with for any aspect...

But it seems that MLC corruption and not death is quite rare.
What I'm curious about from a "how is this happening perspective?" and maybe someone knowledgeable on NAND chips can come in, do the read/write cycles play a factor into how long these are allowed to be without power?

The Wii U's MLC NAND is supposedly very cheap. I saw one figure say it is rated for about ~1000 R/W cycles. That's abysmally low. If it was at 1000, or worse, over, is the period of time its without power worse than if it was still "healthy"?
If so, this issue is going to get even worse, and very fast, because simply starting up and shutting down the Wii U is eating those cycles hard.
 

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I have since backed up all 3 of my system's NANDs. Finished it up yesterday. Now I wonder how can one go about disaster recovery? I mean if the system bricks, how would you be able to take the NAND backup and restore it so that the system will work again. Fortunately, none of the 3 that I own have any issues.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-i-fixed-160-0103-system-memory-error.626448/
But it seems that MLC corruption and not death is quite rare.
What I'm curious about from a "how is this happening perspective?" and maybe someone knowledgeable on NAND chips can come in, do the read/write cycles play a factor into how long these are allowed to be without power?

The Wii U's MLC NAND is supposedly very cheap. I saw one figure say it is rated for about ~1000 R/W cycles. That's abysmally low. If it was at 1000, or worse, over, is the period of time its without power worse than if it was still "healthy"?
If so, this issue is going to get even worse, and very fast, because simply starting up and shutting down the Wii U is eating those cycles hard.
eMMC will eventually fail, but right now the issue seems to also be a problem with the memory chips used on early production systems having a bug.

Albeit that early production isn't exactly small as Nintendo expected the Wii U to seell a lot better. Also Hynix ones seems to not be reliable for that or other causes too, but not sure in what year productions Hynix ones were used.

The Toshiba memory chips seems to be the most reliable at the moment (in the case of the Wii U):
 

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The emmc chip itself is not married to the console from what I can tell. Only the content is. But you could say the content of the MLC is 'married' to the content of the SLC, because the SLC contains a cache for the MLC. This SLC cache is saving precious write cycles on the MLC but it also means if you restroe an older backup of the MLC, it wont 'fit' the current cache and the file system becomes inconsistent. So if the MLC fails you need to restore both, the MLC and the SLC via the Hardmod.
If you want to save yourself from doing the hardmod on the SLC you should replace the MLC at the first signs of trouble, because then you have the chance to migrate the current, still working MLC over.

In my case it seems like the data corrupted from a long time of not usage. I could get the eMMC back to working but only for a short time before it finally died for good. It really seems to be a bad batch of these Hynix chips in the early 32GB models.

Also I am not sure if just powering on is enough, because the eMMC probably doesn't check all the data but will only notice corruption when the data is read. So I would recommend to also do a NAND Backup from time to time, so every block gets read and the eMMC gets a chance to detect errors and correct them, while they are still correctable.

Also it is nothing special that the MLC is losing data over time. It's normal and expected for Flash, some Server SSDs even guarantee to hold data only for a few months. But there it isn't a problem because the SSD is always powered on and so the controller, which is a little more sophisticated can regularly rewrite the data or at least check it for errors an correct them. What is not normal is that these Hynix chips in the Wii U are loosing the data so fast. Also they could have a firmware bug, as my chip was just returning random values for some bits everytime they got read. Normally I would expect the eMMC to produce an I/O error if the error is not correctable.
 
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Dyhr

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https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-i-fixed-160-0103-system-memory-error.626448/

eMMC will eventually fail, but right now the issue seems to also be a problem with the memory chips used on early production systems having a bug.

Albeit that early production isn't exactly small as Nintendo expected the Wii U to seell a lot better. Also Hynix ones seems to not be reliable for that or other causes too, but not sure in what year productions Hynix ones were used.

The Toshiba memory chips seems to be the most reliable at the moment (in the case of the Wii U):

eMMCs shouldn't be even remotely close to failure at this point. What is the Wii U doing that it's always writing literal terabytes of data to the eMMC that is basically just the barebones of the OS + bootloaders in such a short time?
It also doesn't seem like we can pinpoint it to "early production", what basis is there that Nintendo stopped using them?

The emmc chip itself is not married to the console from what I can tell. Only the content is. But you could say the content of the MLC is 'married' to the content of the SLC, because the SLC contains a cache for the MLC. This SLC cache is saving precious write cycles on the MLC but it also means if you restroe an older backup of the MLC, it wont 'fit' the current cache and the file system becomes inconsistent. So if the MLC fails you need to restore both, the MLC and the SLC via the Hardmod.
If you want to save yourself from doing the hardmod on the SLC you should replace the MLC at the first signs of trouble, because then you have the chance to migrate the current, still working MLC over.

In my case it seems like the data corrupted from a long time of not usage. I could get the eMMC back to working but only for a short time before it finally died for good. It really seems to be a bad batch of these Hynix chips in the early 32GB models.

Also I am not sure if just powering on is enough, because the eMMC probably doesn't check all the data but will only notice corruption when the data is read. So I would recommend to also do a NAND Backup from time to time, so every block gets read and the eMMC gets a chance to detect errors and correct them, while they are still correctable.

Also it is nothing special that the MLC is losing data over time. It's normal and expected for Flash, some Server SSDs even guarantee to hold data only for a few months. But there it isn't a problem because the SSD is always powered on and so the controller, which is a little more sophisticated can regularly rewrite the data or at least check it for errors an correct them. What is not normal is that these Hynix chips in the Wii U are loosing the data so fast. Also they could have a firmware bug, as my chip was just returning random values for some bits everytime they got read. Normally I would expect the eMMC to produce an I/O error if the error is not correctable.
I mean, that sounds like the contents of it are married to the chip with extra steps.

I'm not sure I'd say this is "nothing special". Flash drives with actual usage more than a bootloader like this MLC chip last immeasureably longer even from less reputable companies.
The Wii U is quite young and the chip has little lifting work to even be doing. Why has there been an apparently widespread problem with eMMC failure for years? Just how badly did Nintendo cheap out here? Did they give mostly worn NAND chips from the get-go?
 

toolazytosearchitmyself

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I have a NAND backup but lack the soldering skills to restore the NAND and it's not worth paying someone to restore it for me. If my Wii U dies, I will rely on an emulator for now on. Luckily, I turned my Wii U on quite recently and it's still working.
 
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Jayro

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I have a NAND backup but lack the soldering skills to restore the NAND and it's not worth paying someone to restore it for me. If my Wii U dies, I will rely on an emulator for now on. Luckily, I turned my Wii U on quite recently and it's still working.
Mine too. I just took my own advice and replaced my battery in the console. Now I'm updating my SD card stuffs.
Post automatically merged:

Any clue what the problem could be here? My homebrew text scrolls off screen and wraps around... Probably an easy fix, but it's been like this forever.

https://mega.nz/file/DYsE1TrB#DmSN9bncK7XYzEwiGJwgGfRb599-H2fx88rg1iKW6H0
The link is a video I took, showing the problem^
 
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Dyhr

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I have a NAND backup but lack the soldering skills to restore the NAND and it's not worth paying someone to restore it for me. If my Wii U dies, I will rely on an emulator for now on. Luckily, I turned my Wii U on quite recently and it's still working.
The good news is that similar to any console, emulators do it better than real hardware. The bad news is that the Wii U, more than we've ever suspected from the awful tablet debacle, is one of the biggest sources of e-waste in gaming.
 

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The good news is that similar to any console, emulators do it better than real hardware. The bad news is that the Wii U, more than we've ever suspected from the awful tablet debacle, is one of the biggest sources of e-waste in gaming.
I dunno, the Xbox One isn't that great either...
 

Dyhr

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I dunno, the Xbox One isn't that great either...
It has a high failure rate but sans APU issues (which are excessively rare since that means a major CPU/GPU failure... although a bit common for the PS5 because of the idiotic use of liquid metal), most of them are very much solvable. The HDMI port is frail and badly soldered, but it can be replaced and repaired fine. Same with the retimer chip, PSU, and hard drive, though the latter requires an external hard drive enclosure/adapter for one of the steps if I am remembering right.

A major contributor to e-waste is literal waste, like the Wii U, or any Apple iCloud-locked devices, etc. Things that literally cannot be used because of an irremovable DRM lock. Failures that can be repaired are not considered a contributor to e-waste, they're just a blight on the manufacturer.

The Wii U literally has every little bit locked to that device. But the problem is it's two devices... the tablet is needed for it to function, and the tablet is paired to only the Wii U that it ever shipped with.
 

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Dyhr

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That's not true: Nintendo sold replacement gamepads in japan, users are regulary purchasing new gamepads on eBay or they buy a new console to use with the old gamepad.
Also how do you explain this PoC where two gamepads are synced to one console? https://gbatemp.net/threads/multidrcspacedemo-using-two-gamepads-on-a-single-console.617955/

Selling them in Japan... hmm. I wonder if they require you to send in your Wii U as well.
Users are generally purchasing them for the purpose of being used with CFW. If you have a working tablet and CFW, you can swap it over.

How do I explain homebrew? It isn't supposed to happen, that's how it happens. You can use off-region tablets with CFW too, but it doesn't mean that there isn't a DRM lock.

As with any Nintendo device, your best experience is by hacking it. Which is profoundly silly but it's a weird high Nintendo gets where you only really get the ability to use or own it by doing something they don't even approve of.
 

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Is there actual deep knowledge? Research about the constantly repeated claim of NAND in Wii U dying because of excess writing?
The same for the statement of this thread: Is data retention time (power off) of the Wii U NAND sub-standard?

I get the feeling that some things get repeated over and over again - one person parroting another. But no hard facts beyond some examples.
The only thing that seems confirmed to me is the unusual high rate of failure in the early 32GB batch.


I agree on Nintendo having included literally useless DRM bullshit in the Wii U. Region locking a controller (Gamepad)? Come on, that doesn't make any sense! Same for the disc drive board locked to a console.

The complexity and compute power (heat, high power consumption) of newer devices makes them prone to earlier failure compared to things like the Game Boy or the SNES. Feels like you need to smash those with a hammer to make them fail.

The whole right to repair thing is a good idea, but alas, I think it is doomed for multiple reasons. Not only Apple, being able and willing to spend potentially billions of $$$ to counter it, the majority of people just doesn't care. A device that is older than a few years is considered to be junk in the eyes of many people. "Platform X is dead! Move on!" You can see this with the example of smartphones. Non user replaceable battery. Do people care? No. Why? Because the phone is considered to obsolete before the battery dies.
Some enthusiasts and preservationists are not important enough to work against the ever changing ("improving") environment of electronic gadgets.


AFAIK the tablet isn’t locked to a specific console, it’s just region locked.
Correct. I use the same Gamepad on all of my Wii U consoles 'cause I'm too lazy to get the other ones unpacked. Syncing it to a different console from the same region takes some seconds.
Region locking it is still nonsense.
 
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Dyhr

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A device that is older than a few years is considered to be junk in the eyes of many people.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. Not a good point to make when it only exists as a point because it was made to be. It's basically the straw man come to life.
 

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This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. Not a good point to make when it only exists as a point because it was made to be. It's basically the straw man come to life.
It is a fact. Sadly. The psychological background why it is like this doesn't matter.
In an economic system built around and based on constant growth (which obviously can't work forever -- greetings from the exponential function), the members of society must be conditioned to think like this: New, new, new!

It is not good. Anybody should fight against it (and trying to keep older things working is a good point). I just doubt any movement against the mainstream will have any substantial success. I'm just having realistic expectations here.

=====

But my actual question is and stays if there is any proven knowledge about inherent design flaws in the Wii U leading to unusual high failure rates.
 
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Dyhr

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It is a fact. Sadly. The psychological background why it is like this doesn't matter.
In an economic system built around and based on constant growth (which obviously can't work forever -- greetings from the exponential function), the members of society must be conditioned to think like this: New, new, new!

It is not good. Anybody should fight against it (and trying to keep older things working is a good point). I just doubt any movement against the mainstream will have any substantial success. I'm just having realistic expectations here.

=====

But my actual question is and stays if there is any proven knowledge about inherent design flaws in the Wii U leading to unusual high failure rates.

It is a fact because it was made to be. When you make a device that intentionally performs worse over the time of being owned and make it where you can't (feasibly) swap out the parts, what you have is a self-fulfilling culture of "only the newest".

If the iPhones didn't intentionally tank their own performance or at least asked you if you'd wish to conserve battery life at the cost of performance (you know, that wild feature all laptops have had for decades called a "power plan"), no problem. But you don't get a choice. The battery is also largely irreplaceable to laymen, and Apple will frequently refuse to do so.

You can't say in earnest "only the newest" would be the standard motto if we didn't have self-deprecating phones or parts for phones, etc., because we've never had the alternative. They depreciate themselves intentionally.
 
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