Ok, a few weeks ago I bought a PS4. And while I'm really enjoying everything it has to offer, there's one thing that really pisses me off: even if your games are physical copies, you still have to install the entire game in the console's hard drive mandatorily. Now, it wouldn't bother me if you had an incredibly big hard drive. Buy while 500 GB (now there's a 1TB model, ok) sounds like a lot, at the moment of truth you'll not even realize and you'll have fill the disk completley. So, 500 GB is close to nothing.

And when that happened to me yesterday, I could do nothing but remember how much critized Nintendo was because of its hard drive size. The thing is that even if 32 GB is total crap if you go for digital games, at least you can play as many physical games as you want, without having to worry about it. And at least you can use any external hard drive on the Wii U (even a flashdrive), while PS4 needs an specific one, open the console, etc...  So, the situation is, in fact, better in Wii U that it is in PS4, or at the very least, is exactly as bad in both platforms for one reason to another. But, for some reason, while PS4 wasn't that much criticized about this situation, Nintendo got a lot of of hate because of it. My question is... why so many hate for one and so little for the other if, in the end, the situation is not very different between them?

And I know I could just remove the data of the games I already finished, but that's not the point.

32 GB << 500 GB

what's your question exactly?

First you compare 32GB to 500GB.

Then you seem oblivious to why its necessary to install all games on the HDD. Think of this, WiiU games come on DVD type discs. Max capacity of 9.5GB. what that tells you is that a level in any WiiU game is probably no bigger than 2GB of assets that needs to be in system RAM at any one time. now imagine you needed to move as much as 5GB of assets from the disc to RAM to load up a level. and that you were doing that all from a disc as opposed to from a HDD which has average speeds that are over 4 times faster than a disc.

And then you somehow suggest that you need to "open your console" to change the HDD in the PS4, I wouldn't call sliding off something that's adequately called "the HDD faceplate" opening the console, just go look at what you need to do to change the HDD in an XB1. That's opening a console

The PS4 supporting external HDDs isn't a priority cause its the only console of the 3 that has instructions on how to change the HDD in the manual and that so doing doesn't void your warranty.

And lastly, you have options, if you don't want to go through the trouble of practicing a little data management, then you can spend $69 on a 2TB HDD and another 10 mins installing it into your console. its not a big deal.

My issue with the PS4/Xbox One drives is one of speed and capacity.
1tb 7200rpm drives are what they SHOULD have used out of the gate on launch, with an upgrade to 2tb later on... Rather than the horribly useless 500gb 5400rpm drives.

Didn't take me long to use up all 500Gb on my console and now using an external USB 3.0 7200rpm 3Tb drive.

As for the WiiU... It's less of an issue because you don't have 40-60Gb worth of data to install for every game with an additional 5-10Gb worth of patches and DLC...
Not to mention lots of NAND gets expensive pretty quickly.
What Nintendo should have done was outlay the console with USB 3.0 ports rather than USB 2.0 so users could take advantage of larger and high capacity drives.

32GB is still quite low, and if you have a lot of games that have updates, like Super Smash Bros, the update data can eat your drive overtime.

It also doesn't help that games like Fatal Frame are digital only in America, as that game is going to have a huge file size.

The Wii U doesn't have a harddrive.

THIS.

We can leave this Thread in peace.

You're actually comparing the 2?

I haven't ran out of space yet but I don't mind deleting a game as it takes 2 minutes to reinstall

and

Pretty much say all thats needed to be said.

First, I'm not comparing 32 to 500gb. I say that, while 32 gb on wii u is nothing if you go for digital games, 500 gb are nothing in PS4 as well if you go, not for digital, but PHYSICAL games.

Why I would care about the reason of why we need to install the entire game in the HDD? That's not my problem, that's Sony's problem. It's annoying, and that's just it.

You're right about the "opening the console" thing, I didn't explained it quite correctly... except for that I'm pretty sure Wii U explains in the instructions and in its website everything you need to know about HDDs. And even if that weren't the case, you don't need to know much about it except that the thing you want to plug is an external HDD it may need an independent AC adapter.

And that last part just made me die laughing. Yeah, no big deal, no problem at all...