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Hardware Recommended External Harddrives?

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kylehaas

kylehaas

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I was playing smash bros with my brother and some friends the other day when my brother decided to lean over all the controller cables.
He pulled the Wii off the shelf and it fell a grand 1.5 feet.

Now it can't read discs at all. =(
Luckily, my Wii is hacked, so I'll just be getting an external harddrive for it.
Can anyone recommend me a good external harddrive? I only need around 300-400gb and want to spend no more than $60.
I've looked around Newegg and Tigerdirect, but I just have trouble judging compatibility with the Wii.

Also,
How would I set up the harddrive when I get it? What apps or updates do I need to have on the Wii?
Should I start ripping all of my Wii games as .iso files or should I use something else? Is there some other program that must be used or will a .iso ripper such as imgburn work?
Will my self-made gamecube multidisks be playable from the external harddrive or not?
 
Thought I'd answer you as no one else did.

I'm not sure what you can get in the US, but in the UK I've found the HDD that's best for price and works with everything is a "Buffalo Drivestation" drive. In the UK these can be found for about £40 ish for a 500GB and less for a 360gb ? iirc about £30 ($60)

Now you asked about ripping the games, well you can't if your wii drive is broken unless you have a VERY rare LG drive for your pc, which you wont have.

You could download the .isos but we are not allowed to talk about that on this forum.

When you get a HDD you can format it as NTFS or FAT, I'd suggest FAT32 with 32K cluster size. You don't need many apps, if you just want to play games then you will need a cIOS and a USB loader, and either HBC to load from, or a channel. Or you can use SNEEK/UNEEK or Sorgs DELUXE+UniiLoader.

You wont be able to load GameCube from USB without spending more money EG a WODE can load GC from HDD/SD but NOT MULTIS ! ! so you would need to extract the games into single images.

I've only just touched on the info to get you started, but this should give you an idea of what to search for in forums.

IMPORTANT ... when soft modding it is worth the time to learn about, bootmii, priiloader and making your Wii as "brickproof" as possible and having backups to roll back to.

btw, it maybe easy to fix the drive as long as the laser and drive motor are intact, and they should be if it was working bfore taking a knock.

Good luck with whatever you decide, the BEST advise is read FIRST, if you don't understand something ASK, then when you're sure of things, then go ahead. Don't do anything you are not 110% sure of or you could cause problems for yourself
wink.gif
 
Thanks for the help, guys.

So, I'm going to have to download images of all my games? I can't just directly rip them?
Could I at least rip my gamecube multidisks and then break them back into single images... Or can the USB loaders not do gamecube at all?

I'll check the compatibility list for a good HDD. I've already got backups of everything, and bootmii is installed and fully functional.
If I wanted to open it up and see if the drive has fallen out of position, how would I go about doing that? Is there a guide?

Obviously, the quickest and most effective route to fixing this would be manually checking on and repositioning the disk drive... I believe it was simply knocked out of position by the fall.

Again, I really appreciate the help.
 
Your pc can rip the GC Multis because they are backups, a pc just can't rip an original game.

That list posted above is really outdated and not something I would use. I'd find a HDD and then start a topic with the name of the drive in the title and ask anyone if they have got one, or search the name and see what people say.

As for fixing the drive, I had a link a long time ago that was really good, but I can't find it, I will look more after I post this. It will not be a case of moving the whole drive, it won't have "fallen out of position" but one or more of the components that make the drive might be a bit off.
This can be many things, so a good dexcription of how the drive acts and sounds is needed for anyone good with this to help you narrow down the exact problem.
EG does it accept disc, or refuse to let them insert ? does it make noises that are not normal ? does it act normal but then give a generic Nintendo message...etc etc.

I'll re-edit IF I find that link m8
smile.gif


This link below has some trouble shooting info for Wii drives...

http://www.consolezombie.com/Wii/Wii-Optic...ting-Guide.html

and more specific...

http://www.consolezombie.com/Wii/
 
Wow. Thanks a lot, pal.
So I guess I can rip backup discs! That works for about a quarter of my library...
I really appreciate the help.
bow.gif


Also, when I insert a disk it spins normally for a moment, then there is a high-pitched screech for less than one second.
After that, it says that it could not be read.

xD
 
Not sure if the info is useful, but there's a few external dvd drives that can rip Wii games with rawdump. Don't need to deal with internals or enclosures. I have one, model GDR-8082N-0106, that's a slim external drive. Google "GDR-8082N external slim" and it should find a few for you. You can also search for rawdump drives. I can say.. that it takes a long ass time to rip a game with these. It's been ages since I ripped a game with my drive, but if I remember right, Zelda took nearly 3-4 hours.
 
I use a Seagate Free Agent GoFlex 320 GB. It's a tiny bit higher than your price range ($70 at Best Buy), but maybe it'll fall within it if you order it online, I don't know. I totally wiped and reformatted it because Seagate has some annoying settings on it to make it difficult to format, so it took about four hours to get it ready to use, but it worked great. The only problem I've ever had with it was more of a minor inconvenience: after leaving it plugged into the Wii with the Wii on standby for ~8 hours, it apparently spun down and the Wii couldn't remount it. This was remedied by just unplugging it and plugging it in again, though.
 
Thanks, bud. I'll see if I can't find one of those, then.
I don't think I'll get an external dvd-drive for ripping...
4 hours a game is faster than downloading, but oh well...
 
WD's never fail me.
One of my friends had a problem with a seagate but he swapped it for WD and everything was fine.
So yeah WD is the way to go.
 
hi, ive just got sky HD, and so removed the seagate 160gb 2.5" ide hard drive out of the old skybox, if i get one of those crappy cheap 2.5" enclosures off of ebay and format it as required. will this theoretically be oki to use with the wii, is there any combatibility issues or is it just hit and miss? thanks in advance. ive always run games from dvd but would like to try out usb loading.
 
90 bucks got me a 1TB Acomdata external, and I have had zero complaints with it.

Buying anything smaller than a TB is likely spending the money poorly.
 
I ended up buying a 40$ Hitachi 500gb harddrive.
It works fantastically; a quarter of it is formatted for wbfs and the rest is normal old FAT32.
Loading times are fantastic and it has really made my wii awesome.\

Woot!
 
Been using a 1TB WD hard drive with USB 3.0 for my Wii games as well as backing up my computer, and I've been very pleased. Recommended especially if you think you might be equipping your computer with USB 3.0 slots anytime in the near future.
 
WD seem to be the best choice i've never had 1 problem with mine neither have many others. 1TB + are just a waste and not needed your never going to need that much space!
 
Bladexdsl said:
WD seem to be the best choice i've never had 1 problem with mine neither have many others. 1TB + are just a waste and not needed your never going to need that much space!
Click to expand...

Never say never. The need for larger capacities is increasing at the same rate as the capacities they manufacture. And with HD content now being so popular, it's easy to use up all the space. I also prefer higher quality music files. Double the memory. Photoshop projects can easily be several hundred MBs. Movie editing projects can be countless gigs in size. Backups of everything as well, takes up plenty of space...
Best to just look at the GB/$ when purchasing an HDD.
 
Y05h1 said:
Bladexdsl said:
WD seem to be the best choice i've never had 1 problem with mine neither have many others. 1TB + are just a waste and not needed your never going to need that much space!
Click to expand...

Never say never. The need for larger capacities is increasing at the same rate as the capacities they manufacture. And with HD content now being so popular, it's easy to use up all the space. I also prefer higher quality music files. Double the memory. Photoshop projects can easily be several hundred MBs. Movie editing projects can be countless gigs in size. Backups of everything as well, takes up plenty of space...
Best to just look at the GB/$ when purchasing an HDD.
Click to expand...
He means as a wii hard drive. You will never need a Terrabyte for wii games
 

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