f0ur2o: Nintendo's choice does put the ram in a greater chance for damage over time... but that's still probably not going to be enough writes to destroy it in the system's expected like cycle (5-7 years).
Loading bits of a wii ISO at a time., however, is a huge difference. With the wii ware games you write them 1 time the entire time you play them. No matter how long that playthrough is, it's still only written to 1 time. Also, the Wii doesn't delete the game from the onboard nand untill you play a NEW game. That is, if you play Mario 64 VC then go play super smash bros brawl then go back to mario 64 it won't need to reinstall back onto the nand. It'll still be there.
If however you played Mario 64, then mario kart 64 and went back to mario 64 it'd have to be installed again taking 3 writes total.
Sorry got a little sidetracked there... If you loaded portions of a Wii DVD game into nand and then launched it you'd have to constantly swap out data as you played since the wii ram has at most 512mb and most wii games are on 4.7gb discs. Even if the average game size was only 2gigs, that'd still mean it's 4x bigger than the wii drive. At first that seems like 4 writes worth right? Wrong. The system will be hopping back and forth between data... That would mean in a single game you may need to load data into ram, delete it to update with something new, then delete that and put the first data back again, etc etc. This could add up to HUNDREDS of writes in a single game session and when you may have only 1-2 thousand writes before issues come up it would burn through the NAND incredible fast.
(edit) you replied again whilst I was typing. This is the difference between 5-7 years with nintendo's system of loading wiiware and maybe 2-3 months if you tried to cache Wii DVD games to NAND from USB/SD
Loading bits of a wii ISO at a time., however, is a huge difference. With the wii ware games you write them 1 time the entire time you play them. No matter how long that playthrough is, it's still only written to 1 time. Also, the Wii doesn't delete the game from the onboard nand untill you play a NEW game. That is, if you play Mario 64 VC then go play super smash bros brawl then go back to mario 64 it won't need to reinstall back onto the nand. It'll still be there.
If however you played Mario 64, then mario kart 64 and went back to mario 64 it'd have to be installed again taking 3 writes total.
Sorry got a little sidetracked there... If you loaded portions of a Wii DVD game into nand and then launched it you'd have to constantly swap out data as you played since the wii ram has at most 512mb and most wii games are on 4.7gb discs. Even if the average game size was only 2gigs, that'd still mean it's 4x bigger than the wii drive. At first that seems like 4 writes worth right? Wrong. The system will be hopping back and forth between data... That would mean in a single game you may need to load data into ram, delete it to update with something new, then delete that and put the first data back again, etc etc. This could add up to HUNDREDS of writes in a single game session and when you may have only 1-2 thousand writes before issues come up it would burn through the NAND incredible fast.
(edit) you replied again whilst I was typing. This is the difference between 5-7 years with nintendo's system of loading wiiware and maybe 2-3 months if you tried to cache Wii DVD games to NAND from USB/SD
