Topic: Using USB Flash Drive as External Storage

I know Nintendo says not to use USB flash/thumb drives with the Wii U, but why? After all, the Wii U uses flash for its own internal storage. I'd love if someone could enlighten me. Thanks.

USB thumb drives are not designed to be constantly reading/writing/deleting files. This wears them out very quickly and trust me you do want to lose your 300+ hours worth of MH3U data....

I have an old 125GB seagate External HD hooked up to my Wii U and I back up the Data once every 2 months in my extra Thumb Drive just to be safe.

Yeah, if you use a flash drive it will be much more likely to fail than a hard drive
I've had three or four flash drives fail on me in my life (from normal use...using the Wii U is definitely much more than the standard usage), but I have yet to have a hard drive to fail on me

If you're only using it temporarily though, you should be fine

Aside from them having less read-write cycles, most flash drives are pretty slow so you'd need to be using professional photog high-speed SD cards to make it worthwhile at which point you'd be spending similar money for a lot less capacity than a conventional hard disk.

I wish we could use SD cards as external storage. Those things are already up to 256GB, so once the price comes down they'd be quite suitable.

You can use SD cards. Just insert them into a USB SD card reader.

But then for the price of a 32 GB SD card and a USB reader, you can buy a 500 GB HDD. And a 64 GB SD card is already like $60 alone...which is the same price as a lot of 1 TB HDDs out there. So a 256 GB SD card would be completely impractical in terms of price-to-storage. I wouldn't get an SD card specifically for Wii U storage. But it could work as a temporary solution if you already have one. Make sure to use a class 10 SD card!

I also thought about SD, but as @PloXyZeRO says, the cost/size/performance ratio doesn't really add up unless you're not planning on getting much online content. I think it makes more sense to buy a couple of hard drives and do occasional copies to have a backup handy, though the method for doing this is EXTREMELY clunky and annoying.

Once the price comes down the price of everything else will also come down. Next thing you know it's the choice between a 256GB SD card, a 500GB SSD or a 10TB HDD at about the same price.

I have used a 32GB flash memory for more than a half year. No problem so far. I was thinking of an external HD but the prices for downloads are insane compared to buying discs from Amazon uk.

I just like the idea of my Wii U being a single contained unit, rather than having a separate hard-drive on the outside cluttering up my desk space.

There are many USB hard drives that are about the size of the average wallet...which can be placed just behind the Wii U in an inconspicuous manner. But if you really need that extra 3 x 6 inches of desk space, I guess it would be a problem..

I am using fast SD card (class 10) for external HDD with USB SD-card reader, only problem is that I always have to expand it, first I had 32 GB, now I have 64 GB and next I will need 128 GB. Though I would like to buy real 500 GB USB-HDD instead, which doesn't use external power and takes power only from USB (max 500mA, about 2,5W), and doesn't need to use Y-cable, but I haven't found any suitable drives yet.

Why not just use a y-cable? Only using just one USB port will pretty much ensure that you'll encounter problems. You can get a y-cable for $1 on Amazon
I have a Toshiba Canvio 500 GB HDD (USB 3.0) and a USB 3.0 y-cable and I haven't had issues yet
Also, if you want to limit the amount of power it draws, you'll really run into trouble, because even one USB port usually doesn't provide sufficient power

I don't have enough ports for Y-cable. I use LAN-connector attached to other USB and certainly don't want to any cables hanging from front ports. I have read it is possible to get USB-HDD which is working only from one USB2 (500mA) port, but these drives are very rare. I just have to expand to 128GB SD-card and meanwhile keep searching for suitable USB-HDD. Fast 128GB SD-cards are easy to get, but they are expensive.

I would rather just use the front USB ports in the front (they are there for a reason!) or get an externally powered HDD than buying 128 GB SD cards, but that's just personal preference

Perhaps using a y-cable with a USB splitter would work (main USB connector goes directly to the Wii U and the secondary plug and the LAN adapter could go into the second port), but I'm not sure if that would work. It should in theory since I doubt the LAN adapter would draw very much power, but I can't say for sure.

But if not, it seems that your current setup works fine, which is all that matters in the end!

Get an external Hard Drive. I'm using a flash drive currently and for update data, it works fine (Assassin's Creed IV had a huge, over 1 GB, update that I used it for), but games, it doesn't.

I bought Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate when it was on sale for $20 and I was able to play it once; and that was even after three failed attempts of installing it. After my first session, it failed to call up the game and said something about an issue with my Hard Drive...

I would also suggest using a y-cable for insurance. The first time I connected my 1TB backup drive using the cable that came with the drive the Wii U recognised it and formatted it, but after that I just got errors and needed to reboot the machine. So I ordered a y-cable from China and the Wii U still wouldn't talk to it. I had to format it with my Mac and only then would it recognise it and reformat it and all was well. Since then no issues, though it is a bit annoying that you need to manually keep track of what's on separate disks and just pick and choose what to copy based upon your own memory. It would be nice if Nintendo had a proper backup routine that would do a delta between drives and only copy stuff that changed.

Hi everyone. Thank you so much for taking your time to answer questions . I just purchased a Nintendo Wii U and I don’t know nothing about consoles yet . I have a question. My friend told me that he would download games for me . My question is 1. Where would it be best for him to download allot of games ? Flash drive , sd card ?
2. Should I need anything else to be able to play them on my Wii U ? Thank you so much for your advice .

1. The eshop.
2. A controller.
3. Please don't revive dead threads with irrelevant questions.
4. If you want links and advice re. pirating games you'll have to look elsewhere.