Hard drive rumors are back

SD cards being cheap is relative. If Nintendo releases a proprietary HDD like MS, then forget it, I'm sticking with SD cards. But if Nintendo opens up the support for any USB harddrive, I have a extra 20GB hard drive that will be slapped into a $20 enclosure... now that's cheap.

If nonproprietary USB drives are allowed, consumers will have the ability to access gigs worth of pictures, music, and VC games on hard drives that go for less than $1 per GB, versus around $20-30 per GB on an SD card.

Hard Drive = XBox Live on the Wii

That's all that's stopping the Wii from having a top-notch online service with full-game, TV show and movie downloads. Just enable the USB port for our own choice of HDD (take that, XBox's "all about choice") and it'll be even better than anything out there now.

Yeah SD cards exist and are cheap, but you can't run VC games from them!! So unless they release an SD Card Channel, then I'll be buying an HDD, as my Wii is full!!!

a hard drive would be awesome my Wii is starting to run out out memory
and #1 "$20-30 per GB on an SD card." no search amazon there are dozens of 1GB SD cards for under $5

ok it might just be me not keepin up with the jones' but, i could swear E3 was dead.. i thought it was renamed something very lame and more consumer oriented..

It was, I forget what it was called but most are either still calling it E3 or the lovable min-E3.

My wii will be out of memory pretty soon especially after a summer of great games and i would love for a hard drive to be released....hopefully a cheap one

For free wii points http://www.ezyrewards.com/?id=161820

Actually, E3 still exists, but it's much smaller, and focused more on the industry. This year's E3 is in July.

http://www.e3expo.com/

The new consumer oriented video game expo is called E for All, and starts this October.

http://www5.eforallexpo.com/

As for the hard drive rumors, I also hope that they just release a firmware upgrade that gives the Wii compatibility with consumer external hard drives. It really would be so much cheaper as vidGuy said.

right, nintendo open their console up to 3rd party hard drives...that's like saying MS is gonna offer free online service or a reasonably priced hard drive. just ain't gonna happen

They opened it up to 3rd party SD cards, didn't they?

I'd love to buy an HDD for the Wii.
...but I'm not paying more than $80 bucks for it. Any higher than that and it's a rip off.

I could definitely see this coming
http://technosyncraticblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/various-nintendo-e3-rumors.html

I cant believe you didn't use this picture for this post:

http://madiart.blogspot.com/2007/03/wfgn-11-sega-love-edition.html

I bought an 8GB SD card off Newegg for $75. I'm hoping for a Wii firmware update that will allow me to run games directly from it. Until then it remains in my camera.

I'd love for Nintendo to debut an external drive or firmware to use third party drives. But I think the more likely scenario is for Nintendo to release a new Wii.. a 'WiiSP' so to speak. Part of Nintendo's business plan seems to be that they release a piece of hardware, wait to see if it becomes successful, then when everyone seems comfortable, they drop a newer version that fixes whatever flaws the original had. They did it with the GBAsp (brighter screen, smaller form factor, better buttons) and the DS lite (smaller, lighter, better battery, better design). They could easily make a new Wii with a larger internal drive and DVD playback.

sure they opened it up to 3rd parties for SD cards, only because there's no way to have an SD card not work on another device...it wouldn't be an SD card!

Wrong, I'm not talking about the form factor but about the media format. Nintendo could have easily locked out 3rd party SD cards by only allowing the Wii to save to an SD card with a special (proprietary) file system.

A proprietary hard drive would look like a regular HDD physically, but would have a different file structure that prevents it from being used elsewhere and from any other HDD (not correctly formated) to be used in the console. That's what both the XBOX and 360 have going on, though I think the PS3 may be wide open because you can supposedly upgrade drives.

Nintendo could have made it so the Wii reads all SD cards (allowing them to still use the Photo Channel and provide MP3 support) but only writes save data and VC games to "NINTENDO MEMORY SD" cards. But they didn't.

Honestly, I'm surprised the console didn't come with USB hard drive and thumb drive support out-of-the-box.

or they could release a Wii with 8GB of internal flash AND enable larger SD cards as well...

also on the Wii's channels menu, they could let you go down instead of just across and the lower set of 48 channels would come straight from the SD car port...

...then could also make an upper set for external HD...

there is flexibility in the Wii's channel menu design...