By Jason Snell
December 30, 2015 9:52 AM PT
Searching for storage in the couch cushions
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
My Wii U came with 8GB of internal storage, not bad for starters but supremely bad when you do things like install Wind Waker HD. Fortunately, it supports external storage, so at some point I found an 8GB USB keychain drive that was floating around my house and plugged it into the Wii U and forgot it.1
Of course Christmas morning brought more games, including Wii games, and holiday break is an intense period of playing video games in any event. And guess what? That 8GB flash drive I repurposed had filled up.
I spent about 20 minutes looking in every drawer in the house for a larger flash drive. Turns out, the 8GB one was the big one—the rest of them were of the 1GB or 2GB variety, or worse. And the Wii U will only accept a single USB storage drive at one time for regular use.
That’s when I had that moment of realization that you often have as someone who is technologically inclined: The realization that the solution you seek is probably on Amazon, and probably costs almost nothing. When was the last time I bought a USB flash drive, rather than having them handed to me in a gift bag at a conference? I bet I can get a 16GB flash drive on Amazon for $20, I thought to myself, cleverly.
How wrong I was. I got a 64GB flash drive on Amazon for $16.
Wow, does technology move fast sometimes.
- Nintendo warns against using flash drives for reasons—”not suited to long-term storage of important game data”—that sound entirely bogus to me. If you care, Nintendo recommends using a powered external spinning-disc USB drive. Have fun with that. ↩
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