Two USB Flash Drives on Wii U?

[Everett1954]

Hi, I like to play backups on my Wii U but my current flash drive is out of memory.

 

Can I format and use a second flash drive? Will it work with WUP installer GX2 ?

 

My only other recourse is to install one larger drive and re-transfer all the backups...

 

Anyone using two USB flash drives for backups? How did you do it?

[Shawn]

It should be able to read from both drives just fine. It will populate the list based on one or two being plugged in. If you only have the first one plugged in, it will only populate the icons for the contents of that stick. If you have both in it will populate based on both sticks. Same thing happens when it only reads the internal memory without external drives attached. It reads what it sees

[Everett1954]

Thanks for the info Shawn.

[Flojomojo]

That's wild! I didn't know you could use two small drives. Is the same thing true of Xbone and PS4? 

 

Edit: answering my own off-topic question. 

PS4 can use one external drive at a time. 

Xbone can use up to two external drives at once. https://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/console/manage-storage

[Shawn]

2 hours ago, Everett1954 said:

Thanks for the info Shawn.

 

If you have an SD card of a bigger size you can use that and your flash drive at the same time too. The SD card will obviously run a little slower but still way the hell faster than disc read times.

 

EDIT: I bought an extra 128GB SD card just for this use  I put all my gamecube and some Wii games on it.

 

[Flojomojo]

That's a great idea. I have a 200MB hard drive on my WiiU and I could make it completely silent by moving everything to solid state. You have to use a PC to transfer stuff, right?

[+remowilliams]

I've got two USB flash drives in the front of my WiiU, one for WiiU games and the other for Wii/GC games.  Quite handy...

[Flojomojo]

That's cool. Nintendo support seems to suggest flash drives are a bad idea though. 

 

Quote

Because these devices have a limited number of rewrites and are not suited to long-term storage of important game data, we do not recommend the use of Flash/thumb drives as an external storage device solution. For best results, we recommend using a external storage device with its own power supply that connects to the Wii U via the USB port on the console.

Commercial Flash memory has a limit on the number of times you can write over it and we don't recommend flash memory devices for long-term storage of important save data.

 

[+remowilliams]

If I was Nintendo I'd say that too - who wants to be held responsible for people and their $8 horrible Chinese random junk drives?

[wierd_w]

I have tested a 256gb SDcard in my Wii-U.  Works fine.  I use that with the vWii to do Wii Backups & homebrew, and use the ext USB drive for Wii-U backups.

 

The original Wii could not handle a card that big.

[Shawn]

26 minutes ago, wierd_w said:

I have tested a 256gb SDcard in my Wii-U.  Works fine.  I use that with the vWii to do Wii Backups & homebrew, and use the ext USB drive for Wii-U backups.

 

The original Wii could not handle a card that big.

 

This is how I set my Wii-U up also. I only needed a 128gb SD card for my Wii side though and I still have a decent amount of free space.

 

EDIT: Another option if you really want to use 2 USB drives is to "hide" the second drive so the Wii-U doesn't see it but the vWii will. It's a stealth mode. You will need apps that are designed to run with stealth though. Most popular apps for the vWii have a stealth release.