Wii U: Create your own y-cable for bus powered USB hard drives

[kanageddaamen]

wfz said:

CityOfNoobs said:

wfz said:
How can I tell if my HDD needs to be Y split or not?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00834SJSK/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00

Got this in the mail today, plugged it in, formatted it, and now I am currently transferring my downloaded data to it. Everyting seems to be working fine. How do I know if it's incompatible? When I try to play a game?

The thing is not that it wont be compatible, it is that you cannot gurantee that the drive is getting enough power. It could work just fine for most things but fail to do so while playing games (due ot the higher amount of power needed) , or it could just work fine all together, there is really no way to know except to try it and see. The device will certainly work in  all situations it is designed to if you use a Y cable though. 

Actually I have the 1TB version of the drive you linked, and I had to purchase a ycable to get the drive to work with my 360 but it worked fine with my PC (I assume this is becuase the USB ports on the 360 do not give as much current as the ones on my PC)

Hrm.. well.. it appears to be working fine. Let's say I start playing NSMBU in a few minutes, how will I be able to tell if the HDD stops working? Will it automatically throw an error sign, or what? I don't really expect you to know, but I'm just rather confused.

What will happen is you will get an error saying that the drive was unplugged.  What happens is it starts to draw too much current and shuts down the connection, effectively disconnecting the drive.  Unfortunately when it happened to me, I had to unplug the Wii U to get it to shut down.  It also caused Nintendo Land to freeze when loading, probably because it was in the middle of looking at the drive. 

If you did a lot of data transfer and had no issue then your drive may not need one, it may operate within the USB 2.0 power limitations.  However, if I were you, I would pick up a cable just in case