| GranTurismo said: Does the wii really need a HDD, they have 8gb SD sticks. I'm not sure how fast the read speeds or transfer data is on these so i'm not sure if they could fill the role of a HDD. But it could of been an idea of nintendo to never have a HDD and just have people buy SD cards. Is there not spot to attach an external HDD by a USB port of something like that? |
Nintendo signed a deal back at the beginning of summer to handle it's storage driver. It's the same company they made a deal with shortly before the Wii's release that allows you to read and write to SD cards (in a very basic fashion). In the deal it says that they will provide a storage driver for the SD card slot to make it 2.0 (SDHC 1.1) and also cover USB flash and hard drive storage. So we know somethings coming, we just don't know when. I have a 4 gig stick sitting in my Wii right now that I can read from but not write to which sucks for the moment since my Wii is full of VC games. I'd love for them to turn the read write option for games on with SD cards and be able to launch them from the Wii Menu. Sadly, it's looking like a January update.
SD cards can read and write pretty fast and have instant search times. The SD card would be perfect for most people. A typical hard drive these days ranges in the 40-50MB range for reads, a fast SD card can read around 22+MB/s. The DVD drive in the Wii reads at around 9MB/s (off the middle ring of the disc) so an SD card is plenty fast for loading games. (Instant seeks help push it over the edge)
EDIT: Here is a link to the Engadgets poorly translated eSol press release.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/05/nintendo-to-enable-usb-mass-storage-devices-on-wii/
The PrFILE2 FAT file system is used on the high capacity SD cards, which he fails to mention in his article.
Prepare for termination! It is the only logical thing to do, for I am only loyal to Megatron.
