I'm confused, so I'll just go with what Kruze said.

Running games directly from encripted external storage, can lead to much larger game-loading times, so I wouldn't put much faith in that.

Actually this is not a true statement. The external HD will be encrypted to the Users not the internal OS of the Wii. The games will load as if there is no encryption at all. Apple has done this with their OSX and internal HDs.


However, what the Smash info indicates is that they are working on a way to save directly to the SD card. This may mean that Nintendo is working on a way to save Wii ware and VC games to the SD card. This would allow users to transfer games to and from the internal memory of the Wii to a SD card and Vice Versa. This could be the refrigerator statement that Perrin used.

Actually, if you had paid closer attention to my post, you'd notice I mentioned a possible proprietary solution (e.g., a Wii harddrive), where stuff could be encripted in hardware with no performance loss. But unless encription is done in hardware, you will notice significant slowdowns, sorry. They'll load "as if" there is no encription at all, but they'll take 30secs to load instead of 3. There's a reason why copying games to and from SD cards is so damn slow, you know?

Plus, your OS X example only proves my point really. File Vault causes significant slowdowns, even more so if it's used with older computers like G3s (roughly equivalent to the Wii's CPU). Believe me, I know, I've tried.

 What do they have saved on that Wii flash memory? honestly? only 62 blocks?

someone hasn't been cleaning out the fridge...

Firstly, finally scored a USB wireless keyboard that works - so typing this on my Wii :) Now on-topic: this doesn't mean anything. The Wii already has SD card support - and has from the launch. The photo channel has always allowed reading/writing data to the card. This might allow for support of higher-spec'd cards, and maybe other devices. The issue with WiiWare / VC has always been that of *running* binaries straight from external storage devices - which would require them to be unencrypted. This could be useful as a storage medium for songs (for instance) in GH, Rockband and other games - but even those games may be likely to encrypt their media.

 Shams... you are wrong.  I've researched the eSOL deal pretty extinsively.  Nintendo has two deals with eSOL which cover the Wii's basic SD card driver and the second deal which covers the USB and SDHC 1.1 driver.  The press release by eSOL that I posted is the second driver deal. Once again SDHC cards are 66x and faster and start at 4GB in size.  Currently the Wii driver only support SD 1.0 which allows for cards up to 2GB.  This driver deal changes everything.

eSOL is also the company which jumped in to help Nintendo out with Wii production after the other company was unable to keep up with parts demand (Circuit boards). 

 I'll point something else out to everyone.  This Wii that was used to show off the SD card write option for photo's is pretty full obviously.  My Wii is also very full so it's not surprising that theirs is as well.  However, the more interesting thing in this picture is the blocks free space on the SD card.  The SD card which they are using is a minimum 1 GB card.  We can tell this by looking at how many free blocks a 1GB card has (Aprox 7000).  A 512MB card would have somwhere around 3500 blocks.  Basically this SD card that's being used is pretty full as well.  I realize that it may have other junk other then Smash brothers material on it, but I doubt it.  If this is a Wii dev kit that's being used for testing Brawl then it wouldn't have other junk data on the system.  At least not as much as these pictures are showing.  So you have to ask...  what is taking up so much space on this Wii that they are showing off?

 There is an excellent article that deals with this.  Basically the encryption standard Nintendo is using is highly advanced and easily implemented apparently.  From what the article stated, there is aprox a 1/2 second delay to handle the encryption during reads and writes.  You wouldn't even notice it.  Nintendo was applauded for their encryption scheme by the people who wrote the article.

 The games are encrypted on the internal storage, the same as they are on external.