And then you're stuck with a dead hard drive. It wasn't designed to have a swappable drive. Once you need to replace the internal drive inside, there's often no way to replace it. Once you've got an enclosure, though, you can replace a drive for 20 dollars or less.Ī dedicated external drive is just as reliable as an internal drive in an enclosure, and they're often smaller and nicer looking, but there's yet another tradeoff. These can be more expensive at first than dedicated external hard drives, though, because you need to buy an enclosure if you don't already have one. There are internal hard drives in enclosures, my personal favorite because you can swap drives out in minutes. If you want to play it safe and get more storage for your money, but don't mind the large size of hard drives - then the hard drive is for you.

If you're willing to take the chance and buy a flash drive so you don't have to have a hard drive laying around - go for it. Personally, I've had 4 flash drives, and out of all of them one of them straight up got killed, one of them didn't launch games, the other kept corrupting, and the last one flat out wasn't recognized by the Wii. Some work great, some don't work at all, and some sort of work. USB flash drives have pretty poor compatibility with the Wii. They have no such sleep issues, they're very small and discrete, and flash storage is getting cheaper by the minute. Most every hard drive won't have a problem either way, as when there's drive activity they'll wake up.įlash drives are a bit of a different story. Hard drives may or may not need external power to avoid going to sleep. Though there's a tradeoff when you switch from a flash drive to a hard drive. None of the compatibility issues of flash drives, and a lot more space. The most universal, quick and easy, foolproof storage device to use for a Wii is an external hard drive. People have different needs in a storage device, and some people think their solution is better than the other. This can be a little bit of a controversial topic around here, and for good reason.

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