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Topic: Anyone had sustained HDD success using a Y-cable?

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gcunit

When I first needed extra storage I used a micro SD card, plugged into a usb adapter, with no external power supply or y-cable involved. And it worked for a while - I had several games downloaded on it and I'd played Tekken from it.

Then for no apparent reason (could have been a system update but no real idea) it started not working - giving sudden black screens with a message about my usb device that "may need more power".

More recently, I bought a Sata-to-USB Y cable to plug into an old laptop HDD. I was able to format the HDD and start downloading games to it, but during the downloads the same error keeps occurring.

I've not come across any official or branded 3rd party y-cables, so would like to know whether anyone else has had success with y-cables and if so, where they've sourced them from.

I can't find any externally powered 2.5 inch HDD shells, but if anyone knows of one then I'd also be interested in trying one of those. Basically anything to avoid having to fork out on an oversized externally powered HDD.

And FWIW, I also use a separate HDD in vWii mode on the same system, and never have a problem - it's just regular Wii U mode that doesn't seem to like the y-cables.

Thanks.

You guys had me at blood and semen.

What better way to celebrate than firing something out of the pipe?

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

My Nintendo: gcunit | Nintendo Network ID: gcunit

gcunit

Well as it turns out I think I've made a breakthrough. It's not 100% but I think it might be good enough. Maybe one day someone else will be struggling and find this...

My Sata-to-usbY cable has one thicker cable and one thinner cable. I switched them over so that the thicker one is in the lower of the two rear USB ports and just by doing that I seem to have a steady connection now.

The reason it's not 100% though is that any downloads onto the external drive fail to install and render the download corrupt, so instead I have to make sure there's enough room on my system storage, disconnect the external hdd, then download the software to my system storage before reconnecting the hdd and moving the software over.

It's a hassle, but this is the first time I've been able to have all my eshop purchases installed at the same time, and I've been able to get playing some games I've put off playing because of storage issues, so I'm pretty chuffed right now. Hopefully it holds together long term.

Sadly there was one victim during this experimentation. My Art Academy Atelier save data became corrupt, so I've lost the little progress I'd made on it, but now I've got it installed I should be able to make that back pretty soon, provided I can get off Zelda and Runner 2.

Also suffered a system freeze while playing FRN tonight, which corrupted a download of Tekken that was about 11gb into its 15.6gb download, which was annoying to say the least.

Edited on by gcunit

You guys had me at blood and semen.

What better way to celebrate than firing something out of the pipe?

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

My Nintendo: gcunit | Nintendo Network ID: gcunit

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