The Wii needs a storage solution--and fast

With yesterday's launch of the WiiWare service, it's now easier than ever to fill up your Wii to the point of full capacity. It doesn't take much to fill up those 2,163 blocks (about 512MB)--between additional channels, the virtual console, and now WiiWare, you're going to need to be doing some serious maneuvering if you want to experience everything the Wii has to offer. So why hasn't Nintendo come up with a solution that can allow owners to expand the storage capacity?

(Credit: Nintendo.com)

While the SD card slot is nice, for many Wii owners it has become strictly a way to back up game saves. You can't directly access it in-game nor can you play virtual console or WiiWare games directly off of it. Why not enable this? Surely this can be accomplished with a Wii system update. And by limiting the memory capacity, Nintendo is essentially preventing customers from buying more virtual console and WiiWare titles.

Rumors of a storage add-on have come and gone, with nothing ever manifesting. If Nintendo plans on adding a new WiiWare title every Monday--in addition to the new virtual console titles they release each week as well--something needs to be done to address this growing concern.

While we'd all like for the SD card slot to allow in-game read and writing capabilities, or for the ability to connect a USB flash-drive, we're guessing it will probably be a Nintendo-branded storage solution that may wind up costing twice as much as it should. We'd personally like to see something like this inexpensive 60GB USB drive, which would also leave room for even bigger WiiWare titles down the road.

How do you think the Wii storage situation should be addressed?

[jcy22]

Needs to be address now! That's all.

[teetlebomb]

I agree that any solution is better than what they have right now. But, my question is: Is the read/write speed of Ninty's SD slot fast enough to allow in game access? When I backed up my system to the SD card before sending it in for repair, it seemed to take way too long to write.

[lallred7]

An external USB drive would be the way to go. I bought my Wii a couple weeks ago, and have already used almost all of the memory. If I have to choose between saving my games or downloading WiiWare, I choose game saves. If Nintendo plans on making money from WiiWare, more storage is a must.

[jskrenes]

Would it be too hard to format the SD card so that it can only be read by your wii only? That would be an easy fix. Given how cheap SD cards are, it wouldn't be too hard for me to have one card for my save backups that I can take to other people's wiis, and a second just to store games on. Just add a format option to format a card for game saves and game downloads.

[crad13]

No, running Virtual Console/WiiWare off of an SD card is out of the question; The read/write rate is much too slow. Save games, however aren't too big of a deal, unless games are appending to the save files very often (SSBB, maybe?). Games like The Legend of Zelda wouldn't really suffer, because the saving of all the changes ingame happens on-demand, all at once. The only problem that might arise is that the saving times may increase.

Another way would be to tell the Wii to reserve a buffer in the system's internal memory, and then move the WiiWare game to the buffer, and then play and append to it from there. This might not work with the Virtual Console titles, because of the suspend point option, but I'm not too sure about that.

Of course, if the Wii worked fully with USB sticks, there wouldn't be much problem just moving and running games off of that, since they're much faster. Like the other guy said, USB sticks are fairly inexpensive, so I could pop in a 1GB or a 2GB flash drive and keep it there, while I use a 512MB stick to archive gamesaves.

Then again, if the Wii could work with external hard drives, the possibilities are endless!

[Rod Roddy]

Storage among other things.

[Composer_1777]

Maybe a master nintendo server dedicated to the individual storage of Wiiware and Virtual console software. With storage capacities reaching mind blowing amounts it might be more realistic to charge people for storage on the master network. How much storage would they need... at 100 gigs per person allowance they would need like 1000 terabytes per region or something. OK, maybe its not such a realistic idea, lol!!! Stick with SD , that is much better than USB drives plus they can double as memory for other devices.

[hemanthesmart]

They should use both SD cards and USB Sticks, as both are supported. It will be {MUCH} easier to do it that way, and a lot more convenient. Who needs propietary memory cards when you've got a flash drive?