It really is the more sensible business approach, for them, and for the market. They aren't 7 years in the past, you are.

nah you can purchase them for a "decent" price. not sure about the ones from microsoft itself but who needs that?

http://www.amazon.com/SANOXY-320GB-Internal-Slim-Drive/dp/B006NRMBF6/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1339688038&sr=8-10

That's pretty impressive, I must say.

But the point was not that HDDs cost a lot, it was that it's not proprietary.

That's just plain misleading.

Deep inside that 360 HDD thing there is a standard 2,5" HDD of course. But unlike the PS3, where you can really simply just plug in any 2,5" SATA drive, Microsoft tried its best to force customers to buy their overpriced proprietary crap.

For example, you can't just plug in any 2,5" SATA drive, as it only works with a few select models, most if not all of them being Western Digital drives if I remember correctly.

Furthermore you have to initialize the drive with a special security file etc. so the 360 will accept it etc.

In other words: Unlike the PS3, on the 360 It's all just a dirty hack that Microsoft tried its best to prevent, and it took the hacking community years to develop. Saying that the 360 doesn't use proprietary HDDs is as misleading as saying the 360 runs burned copies of games.

On the actual thread topic: Seems like a good decision to me. The only criticism I have is that I would have preferred if they had reserved room inside the case so that it was ALSO possible to place the drive internally. Simply for the looks. But with 64GB SD cards being quite cheap nowadays and providing enough storage to store over a dozen retail games, I guess in practice that's not going to be much of a problem anyway.

I think on the long run, as HDDs get cheaper and cheaper, Nintendo should include them in the system. Reason being, I believe there are more casual audiences interested in digital software than you may think, if Netflix and the likes is any indicator of digital content popularity.

Know what I mean?

Ultimately it's the 2.5 inches HDD right? Not something that MS makes it on it's own. So even if it is proprietary, it's because of a software.

Well that guy it's a diehard sony fan. He constantly attacks Nintendo and praises whatever sony does.

But back on topic, I wouldn't bother to have a HDD in the WiiU, I know I will almost don't use it, so no worries for me. However its seems odd from Nintendo to not have one itegrated. Yes you can buy one, but it sucks to have one always connected via USB in the console, it just doesn't look good.

will wii U read NTFS(huge doubt here since NTFS is a MS file system), fat32, ext3, ext4 or none of them and use a proprietary File System?

will it read partitioned HDDs or will it need to be the whole disk due to safety and piracy measures?

this questions are important as well.

Yes, but for launch, 8GB is more than enough for the 'casual' consumer, at least initially. Then when they plummet in price, like USB sticks and SD cards before them (I got a 128MB, that's 1/8th a GB for the 'younger' users, USB stick 8 years ago, and it cost £20), they'll include the HDD, remove the Flash Memory and it'll cost the same.

Wrong thread lol