Topic: I need a Hard Drive - NINTY Support is terrible

Don't have any definitive answers, which makes me about as useless as Nintendo themselves, but a few thoughts after over 2 1/2 years of dealing with this low internal storage nonsense.

All 4 Wii U USB ports are 2.0, so no need to spend more money on 3.0, but 3.0 will work.
A lot of comments I've read are from people using flash drives even though Nintendo says not to. The reasoning is simple, 3DS uses standard SD Memory cards and Nintendo doesn't warn against those, so what's the difference?
Try to pick one and stick with it. My old external HDD has been making a LOT of noise lately so I purchased and installed a 64GB thumb drive yesterday. It took over 45 minutes just to transfer 10GB of Disney Infinity. Another few hours for the rest. And only being able to hook up 1 at a time is annoying reading all of those warning messages.

Any powered external HDD should work, Wii U is going to format it anyway. Any non-powered HDD should work as long as you have a Y cable. Any USB flash drive should work, until it doesn't.

There is a size limit, but I don't recall so won't say but you should check first.

Sorry I'm not more helpful.

What I did was just go to Amazon and read reviews on HDDs, to see if they were compatible with Wii U. I went with a WD My Passport with Y cable and have had no issues ever since. Space is a concern now, but just the opposite: no way I am filling that disc!

I bought regular USB Stick 3.0 32GB for 12€ just for Xenoblade Chronicles DLC and it works perfect. Just look for high write and read speeds. Wii U support 2.0 usb but faster is better. Anyway, it will use max 2.0 speed from that stick.

This is one of the reasons I have yet to pick up XCX. I don't have enough space for the extra data packs and I don't want to delete anything. I do NOT want an external HDD that I need to plug into a power source. That disgusts me.

If I could have just bought XCX and played it the second I popped it in the Wii U, I would certainly be playing now. I know it's a minor thing, and if I really wanted to play it I could, but it IS a bit annoying and I AM distracted with a ton of other games, so it makes sense something like this has held me back from playing the game, it's a problem NO OTHER game I have interest in has. I really hope the next Nintendo console has plenty of HDD space. 32 gigs is embarrassing.

Got my WiiU all hooked up and running.
Got my NNID transferred over.
For storage, I went with:
ThermalTake BlacX Series Dual Hard Drive Dock and a
WD 500gb 2.5 Internal Hard Drive
The set-up works beautifully!
And all for under $90 at Best Buy!