Wii U Internal Storage Upgrades are possible

[QuarkTheAwesome]

Thanks to the amazing work of @SDIO, @shinyquagsire23, @GaryOderNichts, and others, we've now proven that it's possible to upgrade the internal storage on the Wii U. I'm not talking about soldering to the USB ports, this is honest-to-goodness System Memory of sizes other than 8/32GB.

No, it is NOT ready for endusers yet. The process is still pretty hacky, actually; and more refinement needs to be done before it's reasonable for non-devs to try.

Here are the parts of the process that have tutorials written:

• How To: Upgrading / Rebuilding Wii U Internal Memory (MLC) by @SDIO
• Using NAND-AID to replace a hardware damaged MLC (160-0103 error) by @V10lator

Known caveats:

• Online is completely broken (including game updates) - this is being worked on! (Fixed!)
• For NAND-AIDs above 64GB, your console must be de_Fused, which also means switching SD cards during boot if you want more than 2GB SD space
• For 8, 32 or 64GB NAND-AIDs, your console must be de_Fused to format and setup the card, but can be stock after that
• For SATA boards we aren't 100% sure yet, but it seems some drives need to have the original eMMC disabled, either via de_Fuse or by cutting its CLK trace. de_Fuse is required for formatting and setup either way
• Quotas are missing, so filling up your storage all the way will cause the system to misbehave (Fixed by @V10lator!)

Credits (so far!):

• @SDIO - worked hard to make a console up and running from blank storage, wrote patches to install the OS, and more! basically behind the whole endeavor
• @shinyquagsire23 - made de_Fuse modchip which makes any of this possible to develop, disc drive disable patch (used for SATA board)
• @GaryOderNichts - disabled MLC size limits, disabled SCFM caches, bypassed the many, many crashes in the bootstrapping process. also UDPIH turned out to be very helpful
• @QuarkTheAwesome - SATA adapter board, initial MLC formatting patch
• @V10lator - Permissions and quotas research, fixed some of the more subtle bugs in the process

I will add more people once their contributions are ready to show

@SDIO's console; 512GB SD card via @Voultar's NAND-AID:

My own console, 120GB SATA SSD via still-in-development adapter board. Note this removes the optical drive.

My own console, 1TB hard drive (this is how I'm gonna keep it until I can get a not-garbage SSD):

Coming soon™!

 

[eyeliner]

This is beautiful.

 

[Ysecond]

holy ……！！！！！
unbelievable！！！
well done ！！！

 

[SDIO]

Just a few things to add:

• This also allows us to recover consoles which lost their mlc.
• Upgrades to 64gb internal storage are possible without permanent defuse, there you just need it for the setup
• with defuse the slc cache (scfm) can be disabled, which improved performance (at least with my sd card) and reduces wear on the slc.
• Using the SATA mod bigger than 64GB should also be possible without defuse (might need disabling of the eMMC in hardware)
• SATA doesn't use scfm by default and should have better performance in general. (eMMC and it's direct replacements are limited to 26MB/s by the SDIO bus)

@shinyquagsire23 would it be ok for you if I share binarys of modified stroopwafel and minute_minute to help people rebuilding their mlc?
We are on Garys Discord and I have all the modifications posted there if you want take a look.

 

[Lostbhoy]

I quote.... "the process is still pretty hacky"...

What other incentive do we need??

Awesome work by all involved... Bravo

 

[lwiz]

This. Is. Huge.

 

[ploggy]

Outstanding work!
I bet it wont be long before we start seeing 3D printed hdd mounts
I'll be doing this on my 8GB model once the bugs are fixed and I source the necessary parts

 

[V10lator]

I'll be doing this on my 8GB model once the bugs are fixed and I source the necessary parts

Online has been fixed already thanks to @QuarkTheAwesome (providing informations and files from their console), @GaryOderNichts (pinpointing and finding a premade fix for the bug) and shutterbug2000 (a Pretendo dev helping with server logs, explaining how network things work, inspecting Quarkys files and stuff).

 

[ploggy]

Online has been fixed already thanks to @QuarkTheAwesome (providing informations and files from their console), @GaryOderNichts (pinpointing and finding a premade fix for the bug) and shutterbug2000 (a Pretendo dev helping with server logs, explaining how network things work, inspecting Quarkys files and stuff).

Great, things are moving pretty fast then
When it comes to the Sata adapter boards, will there be a parts list or are they going to be sold ready made?

 

[martravi]

While you're at it: Any plans on figuring out the Wii U's BluRay drive-marriage mechanism so you can replace BluRay drive controller boards without swapping around the SPI flash between drives?

 

[V10lator]

Another small update: Gary and me where able to successfully create and remove a quota for the first time.

Still things need to get polished and find their ways together, so stay tuned.

 

[leejaclane]

Very exciting stuff. I doubt I'll be doing this any time soon myself, but it's great to see people working on this.

 

[ReveriePass]

This is incredible!

 

[Ettino]

This is awesome. Wii U with 2tb internal storage would be nice.

 

[SDIO]

Biggest micro sd I can find is 1TB. But with the SATA adapter 2TB should be no problem

 

[GerbilSoft]

If I'm reading this correctly, the "formatting device and installing OS titles" part is basically doing what a DDI flash does on dev, but on retail by using de_Fuse to run arbitrary code at boot time. Using a SATA storage device directly instead of bridging it to eMMC is a nifty addition; would like to see performance numbers comparing that to an unmodded system.

 

[CMDreamer]

I'm watching this thread now, these are awesome news! I will be able to finally recover my non starting Wii U!

Thanks a lot!

 

[Sypherone]

Ya, replacing the optical drive with a hdd/ssd or even a nvme (with sata adapter) is really cool stuff.

 

[SDIO]

nvme won't work. The interface is SATA/AHCI, thus only SATA devices will work. But a M.2 SATA Adapter could be possible and would make sense if you don't want to physically remove the disc drive

Post automatically merged: Jul 2, 2023

If I'm reading this correctly, the "formatting device and installing OS titles" part is basically doing what a DDI flash does on dev, but on retail by using de_Fuse to run arbitrary code at boot time. Using a SATA storage device directly instead of bridging it to eMMC is a nifty addition; would like to see performance numbers comparing that to an unmodded system.

I am not sure what DDI does exactly. What we are doing is using stroopwafel as a vehicle to apply a set of patches: disable panic, enable formatIfNeeded and for more then 64GB SDIO also patches to disable SCFM and to use the whole capacity.
Then I also abuse the seperate wupserver thread started by stroopwafel to: create the minimum required folders and install all the 52 system titles, that go on the mlc. In the end we set initalLaunch o 255 to trigger a factory reset.

Thats all.

EDIT: of course it would be nicer to hook into the MCP after the MLC mount to trigger the folder creation and install instead of using the other thread and forcing the IOSU to stay alive with the panic patch

 

[fwannmacher]

My body Wii U is ready!