Topic: External Harddrive

Recently while downloading Splatoon my external harddrive failed to detect itself on the Wii U harddrive. This is the first time this has happened. Afterwards, the hardrive has been performing very sluggishly and loadtimes are much longer. What happened? Any suggestions?

3 questions

Has this happened before?(detection failure)
How long have you had the drive
Does it have an external power supply or does it use a Y cable?

1. The detection failure has not happened before this was the first time.
2. I've had the drive for about 3-4 months.
3. I ordered the wrong cable but bought a usb power hub which worked perfectly until now.

If I were you at this point I would delete everything but the save games and copy them to the internal memory.

Then run the PC Test Program from whoever made the drive.

And then reformat if it seems to be ok.

It is annoying but less so than losing all saves.

Powered hub could be a problem. As with all HDDs, it's a matter of when they fail, not if. If you were unlucky then your drive is failing early. Back up your data via another Wii U formatted drive and transfer/copy what you deem important over. As @unrandsomsam said, test it via whatever HDD test program you can your hands on. There are a lot of paid/free options out there. Reformat AFTER backing up the data(because Wii U format usually isn't recognized by Windows/mac/Linux I believe) then test. Worst case scenario just use another drive and transfer everything over. Good luck!