Because if they do, I'll probably start downloading all of the time.  I know the optional install has made a hell of a difference in certain Xbox 360 games and it helped with Hot Shots Tennis, Peace Walker, and Valkyria Chronicles II on PSP.  I think that downloading may be the way to go--as long as my console doesn't break down.

Any confirmation?

I think there would be hard facts on the Wii U's faux-Blu-Ray drive's read speed and data transfer speed versus the public knowledge of bus speed for a USB HDD (the internal SSD on Wii U would be significantly faster, but its size, of course, is limited for retail games)

Can't say m'self.

well i think the performance is better with HDD, i have 3 games on phisical and yes the loading times are longer.

The tests I've run on loading times have been pretty much a wash. Some games load faster on internal flash than external HD, some the other way around, but the difference is less than 10% either way.

I haven't bought any game twice to test whether it's faster or slower on a disc, but the fastest and the slowest load times I've seen were both disc-based games.

My guess is that Nintendo has deliberately normalized performance between disc, flash, and USB to guarantee a uniform experience no matter which medium the game is loaded from. If internal flash were allowed to load much faster than a disc, for example, it might lead to unexpected software problems.

I can only confirm that the internal "cheap flash" storage of the Wii U is slower than the worse USB 2.0 HDD you can attach to it.

I think technically the USB 2.0 HDD is faster than the Wii U "Blu-Ray" disk, but if you try a game like Lego City Undercover (which has the longest loading of any Wii U game), than I personally don't feel the HDD loads any faster.

I suppose this is similar to how the PS3 games on SSD don't run noticeably faster than running the same game from Blu-Ray disk... even though the SSD is 100s of times faster than the Blu-Ray. It must have to do with how the game is coded/optimized to read from a slow Blu-Ray than a wide variety of speeds available on the HDD.

Bottom line, putting game to HDD is more about convenience than performance.

Thanks C-Money.  You've been infinitely helpful.  Guess I'll stick to retail instead of putting all of my eggs in one basket.

The internal WiiU memory is an SSD^

I have Monster Hunter and The Wonderful 101 and ZombiU downloaded , wind Waker on Disc and Deus Ex on the ExterHDD

I download because the DPP and the download games do run faster and they dont tax the disc drive. The Disc Drive in the WiiU is faster than the PS3 mind you