Topic: IDE hard disk for Wii U? Fast enough?

Hi guys! My first post

I just got a Wii U, and absolutely love it! Now I want to add an external HDD to it, and I have an 320GB IDE HDD in
an external case lying around(with its own power supply)

Will this be okay for Wii U use, or should I go for a SATA? Will there be much difference?

Thanks!
Nicholas

Sure! Any hard drive with external power source will work just fine and is recommended by Nintendo. As for the speed difference, I don't know.

Theoretical speeds
IDE 133: 1Gbps
SATA 1: 1.5Gbps
SATA 2: 3Gbps
SATA 3: 6Gbps

USB2 bandwidth: 480Mbps

Fastest HDD on the market benchmark
1TB VelociRaptor , 10k RPM SATA 3 6Gbps: 1.3Gbps

Standard HDD benchmark:
3TB WD Green: 0.75Gbps

You'll be limited by the HDD and then USB2 before the internal interface matters. So why better versions of SATA? Well
SSD benchmark: 4.2Gbps

IDE hard drives read and write a lot slower than SATA, but if that's all you have, there's no harm in using it, especially since you have the enclosure or the adapter. If you run into issues with it, maybe look into replacing it with a SATA drive or getting a new external HDD all together.

@SphericalCrusher
Umm sorry, no, they really don't. Assuming it's a USB2 enclosure not USB1 and assuming it's not a very low RPM drive it will run just as well as pretty much any other drive in terms of performance. The USB interface will be the bottleneck. SATA's great but it wasn't really created because drives were saturating the drive interface. Not single mechanical drives anyways.

That said I would be wary about any IDE drive more generally. If it's that old it's probably close to death and I probably wouldn't trust it.... but the same is probably true of my ad-hoc old laptop drive setup I have with my Wii U so.... do as I say not as I do

RPM speed, they can be even, depends on both drives. As far as transferring large files, Sata drives have the higher cache most of the time. The one I use, has 32MB cache for my WD which can help with moving those larger game installs. They do rely on USB because, well they are using external interface on WiiU, but if you were comparing the two outside of that, then there's no point.

I do agree of the age factor. If you have a friend or if you can run a quick GWSCAN, LifeTools, LifeGuard, etc scan before committing to it, that would be best.

Getting sidetracked a bit but there is an interesting point about a cache, it can only improve performance if it's not full. The cache on a HDD is there mostly to hold the data while the head moves into position and it doesn't particularly help when moving large files. Because once the file is bigger than the cache you'll be waiting for the mechanical parts to catch up. It's really there to help with small or fragmented files.

Anyways you missed my actual point. It's not that the drives were slower because of the IDE connection because actual drive performance hasn't really changed much for a long time. For all of that time it has been able to saturate USB2 but, in most cases, still rarely saturates the limits of IDE. If an IDE drive is slow it's probably more because it is more likely to have a < 8MB cache, is probably < 7200RPM and is probably on its last legs. If it still works it'll be good enough.

Seagate Backup Plus 2TB, works wonderful.

Yeah, I agree the IDE is going to work fine, especially in a USB enclosure. However, if you pick IDE over SATA in a desktop PC (Granted your motherboard has the old IDE slot still)... then there's an issue. lol

Just barely in some 7200RPM drives sometimes. Mechanical disks are very, very slow compared to most other components. The only reason SATA was a bit of a performance advantage was because they started to want to do 10,000 RPM drives. Rest of it was because IDE cables sucked, SATA cables were cheaper to make and SSDs were on the horizon.