Wii external memory support via eSOL

[DarkNight_DS]

KruzeS said:
@DarkNight_DS, source please. Not that I'm doubting, I'm just interested anyway. Both for those encription comments, as well as your aparent belief that SDHC support may come regardless of hardware. Thanks.

And as to my comments regarding encription, it still takes an awful lot of time to copy games back and forth from the Wii to an SD card. Much, much longer than it takes to copy them from the SD card to (e.g.) my NAS (where I keep backups of everything). So, if it's not encription and/or bad drivers, then the Wii card loader is really, really slow. Seriously, I remember it taking more than the time to download, for small stuff like Bomberman (and I have a 1Mbit connection, so nothing fancy).

 This website contains some of the info:  

http://forums.nintendo-scene.com/index.php?topic=797.0

Wikipedia has info on the encryption used:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_cryptography 

The original Xbox also had some very strong encryption.  The Wii takes it a step further by encrypting everything.  All data passed between the Wii and Nintendo is encrypted.  We don't see a 30 second delay for the Wii to encrypt and decrypt data when doing online functionality obviously as the encryption used is very optimized for lower powered CPU's.  

To answer your other question about SDHC.  The part of the press release I copied into this thread is only a small part of the info available at the link I provided.  You can easily go to their website to read the rest of the press release.  You can then do a search for info on the original eSOL deal on google.  

To say that external storage isn't coming is pretty silly.  There is no way that Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles is going to fit in about 150 of Wii storage space.   All the data points to it happening.  SD 1.0 readers can be upgraded to support SDHC 1.1 through driver updates.  The Wii will end up using SD cards as it's main storage option.  The USB storage may still come and maybe you will be able to select in your Wii config what kind of storage you prefer.  Games could recognize this setting and display your choice in their menu's.  You can encyrpt all data on the card, each VC game has a key linked to just your Wii.  It's pretty impressive stuff.  As for why it takes so long to read and write data to the SD card I'm not sure.  However I have noticed that the Wii likes to snoop things first before doing anything with it's online connection.  Most likely the Wii snoops the SD card for certain data it finds interesting each and everytime the Wii does a read or write to it.  Nintendo could easily change this to happen upon detection of the SD card in the slot.