Wii U Has 8 GB of Internal Storage

[gumby_trucker]

dahuman said:

you forgot to mention the difference in seek time, optical drives have terrible seek times in general so if multiple assests are being loaded, HDD would be faster anyways. If you are crazy enough to use SSD on USB2, which I don't recommend, it'd be even faster. SD Cards also have faster seek times as well, SDHC Class 10 only does about 10MB+/- per second though, not the most ideal for data streaming heh, but very good seek and burst buffer rates.

My aim was only to address the potential costs of having an external HDD, and none of the benefits, which is why I entirely skipped mentioning seek time and other parameters where optical media is at a disadvantage to begin with.

One issue regarding this which I did not address is that of fragmentation. I don't know how Sony or MS handle this with external hard-drives but they must have some precautions in place, otherwise there is always the risk that eventually seek times will become too high. I'm sure Nintendo is taking such precautions as well.