Flash drive or hard drive

[dagz]

Recently softmodded my wii with thanks from some of the guys on dk!!!! Now just wondering what's the best thing to run your games off USB stick or hard drive and how do we make back ups of our games or can we simply download them from somewhere ?

[happy_highlander]

Hard drive preferably not usb powered and all the usb loaders have a backup facility. You just put the original disc in and transfer to hard drive by whatever button is used on the loader you are using, (they are almost all one click backup options) or if your original is too damaged to be used then download from all the usual places.

[Keithuk]

Now just wondering what's the best thing to run your games off USB stick or hard drive and how do we make back ups of our games or can we simply download them from somewhere ?

A mains power external USB drive of course. Some USB powered drives work but its hit and miss. You are limited to the size on a USB flash drive but even if you goto to bigger sizes the price out weighs the cost of an external USB drive.

These can be formatted FAT32, WBFS or I believe the later USB Loader GX does support NTFS. Windows won't format large drives FAT32 so you need to use EASEUS Partition Master its free.

I personally use WBFS Manager because its simple to use and works everytime.

I think with the FAT32\NTFS formatted drive you just add the game iso named by the game ID and the game name. I shall have to try this sometime on my other spare drive.

All the 3 main USB Loader have provision to backup your original discs to the HDD, they all list it as Install for some strange reason.

You can download them but we can't talk about that on here.

[dagz]

Cheers guys hard drive it is then wheres the best place to them I know all the usual places but didn't know If you guys know where you coz get great deals on them ?

[dagz]

Keith just read your last bit of post so I know what your saying no more mention of !!!!!!

[Keithuk]

Where is the best place to get a powered external USB drive?

There are loads of places eBay is popular but if its a used drive then you would need to format it and do a full scandisk to check there are no bad sectors. What size well that up to you have many games you want to store. My first drive was 120GB and that would hold 67 games. Work it out if you have 100 games to store then a 200GB drive should cover that but then you find loads more games, oh I should have bought a bigger drive, what will hold alot will hold a little.

I bought 2 1TB FreeAgent? GoFlex***8482; Desk External Hard Drive ?55 each but they have more than doubled in 5 months.

Check out the USB Compatibility List before you buy.

Another list.

Wii USB Compatibility List

[happy_highlander]

The compatibility list is must and I use an iomega 1tb 3.5" mains powered and have no problems running even the pickiest if stuff with it formatted to fat 32 with 32kb clusters