Rumor: Reggie promises 'storage solution' -- not a hard drive?

by Christopher Grant on Sep 8th 2008 3:19PM

The saga of the Wii hard drive continues. While "geeks and otaku" everywhere wonder – often aloud – why Nintendo hates them so much, Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime tells Latin American Nintendo magazine Club Nintendo (roughly translated by Nintendo Everything and corroborated by GoNintendo), "We are working on a storage solution ... We have never said that it will be a hard drive nor have we mentioned how we will fix this issue, but we are going to deliver a better way to store the games."

If it's not a hard drive, then what is it? Super futuristic holographic storage mayhaps? Or USB mass storage support, so you can use that external HDD you've already got? Hell, we'd settle for enabling game playback from the totally under-utilized SD slot. Then all Nintendo needs are some halfway decent WiiWare titles, and we've got ourselves a deal.

Source – Reggie: We never said the Wii storage solution is a hard drive
Source – Reggie says no hard drive...but a better solution

Tags: Nintendo, Reggie-Fils-Aime, Wii, wii-hard-drive

Reader Comments (78)

A NAS perhaps? Or just make the SD slot more useful as the post suggests.

Perhaps online storage?

Online storage is basically what they are offering now. You delete the games you are not playing, and re download them whenever you want.

But is not very practical.

And stream the games requires a very fast internet speed.

If it's an online storage solution, I swear to God I will track Reggie down at the next E3 and kick him SQUARE IN THE TAINT for such a stupid idea.

File hosting was the first thing that came to mind for me too. I don't know what makes you think Nintendo is trying to be practical, Fernando - if they were be, this problem would've been solved a 2 years ago.

I'm sorry, my grammar is in the gutter today. That's what happens when I start posting from class.

I'm sorry, I wasn't aware you can have a "storage solution" that doesn't involve HDD at one point or another, unless you count the SD support which isn't exactly a good idea considering how quickly 2GB can fill up.

With software that absolutely maxes out at 64 MB (and that is very rare)

2 GB could last you quite some time. Remember that what you have available for Wii is actually closer to 280 MB, not the 512 they would have you believe

Well it's possible to fit a lot more than 2GB onto flash memory cards and sticks these days, but we'll see whether thats the route they want to take.

@Haggard

Well, using higher capacity SD cards is very likely out. Anything over 2GB is SDHC which is not supported by the Wii.

Vidikron

The Wii doesn't support SDHC right now, due to the firmware. But the hardware is capable of reading and writing SDHC cards.

Just look homebrews aplications. Or YouTube videos. They have been using SDHC cards since long time ago.

@Fernando

Oh yeah? Well, that's good to know. I haven't spent much time around the Wii "scene".

Wow... a 5 1/4 floppy... hadn't seen those in person in at least a decade or two; playing THE OREGON TRAIL on the Apple II or whatever. :\
-feels old now-

Oregon Trail FTW.

Ahh, the memories of playing with your friends, naming the characters after them and then making fun of your friends when they died of dysentery or small pocks.

Unfortunately, I never played the original Oregon Trail. I played my fair share of King's Quest III, though.

A better solution, in my opinion, would be to allow USB flash storage. Is cheap (a 16GB USB memory can be found in Best Buy or Circuit City for about $30 dlls) and is faster than SD cards.

But allowing any kind of USB Mass Storage would the the best solution: HDD and USB flash memories. Besides, Nintendo clearly stated that they are not releasing a propietary storage solution, so the USB Mass Storage solution is very possible.

It has to be something proprietary and simple, with lots of markup potential. A hard drive would make too much sense.

Hard drives do not go down in price over time, they only go up in capacity. That means hefty markups are difficult. Reference: outrageous price on 360 hard drives.

If you love making money on hefty markups, hard drives do not make sense.

I agree with Longshot. It is definitely online storage.

What do you do when you surpass Comcast's monthly bandwith cap? Wait until next month to play your games?

Think of how slow it takes to download a game from Nintendo's servers. Online storage would never work properly.

To download, yeah. But to stream games, since pretty much every VC title (and most WiiWare stuff) could be stored entirely in RAM, could be possible

@Time: I think Nintendo just figures that since most of their online offerings are VC ROMs and crappy WiiWare titles, most games will be small and re-downloading them won't be an issue.

I'm sure people living in the real world will disagree, but who cares about those people?

I'm thinking it's going to be an online hard drives. At my work we have 2 TB of memory that we access online. That way, there's no need for a external hard drive.

When I saw storage solution I thought it would be a place you could put you wii so it didnt get dust on it.

:-P

I actually use my Wii a little too frequently to put it in a closet, but points for teh funny.

Comma, Dirty. Dirty, comma. Mingle.

WTF. Stop staring at me freak!

They're not gonna do a damn thing; they've been blowing smoke for two years.

Even if they did do a HDD, it's too little too late...

Thumb drive would be neat.

Club Nintendo it is not a Spanish magazine, it´s Latin American.

Fixed!

Actually, is a mexican magazine. I have some pics with some of the editors (Gus Rodriguez)

It'll basically be a hard drive. The same way a "Wii Optical Disc" is just a meh quality DVD.

Good point. "It's not a hard drive, it's a Nintendo Drive!!"

Lol, both posts above FTW!

Vroom! Vroom!

How many people really care? I buy tons of stuff on my 360, but never a thing on my Wii. Super Mario RPG would be interesting, but I'm not exactly lacking anything else better to play.

Probably those people who have a Wii as their only console. It does happen.

A lot of people cares.

Just to give you an example: Telltales said that StrongBad game was selling a lot more than the PC version. A point and click adventure game by Telltale selling more on Wii than in the PC is a pretty good deal.

And for example: Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 both games have sold more than 500,000 copies, just as for example, Geometry Wars.

When there's nothing else to play on the Wii, I'd imagine a lot of people would buy it.

I mean, the PC cheap downloadable game market is pretty damn crowded.

I will eventually need some room on my Wii. I haven't hit the limit yet, but that's just because they stopped releasing good games (until Super Mario RPG - yay!).

Personally, I use my Wii almost entirely for playing classic games, with Resident Evil 4 and Twilight Princess getting played sporatically.

By the way, why is it that I can't get into Metroid Prime 3? I enjoy the game. I love the controls. But I just can't get into it. Fernando, what's wrong with me?

@ Anam

Something didn't quite click for MP3 for me either, and MP1 is my favorite game ever. And that might be why, actually. MP3 is great, but never reaches that feeling of awe that comes when you play (and replay, and replay) the original and unsurpassable Metroid Prime

Dude its a Mushroom Hard drive. It comes in blue, yellow, red, white and black, and when you turn it on the little mush eyes turn on O.o

Okay here's a crazy thought,

You know how you can get USB SD card readers, well how about reversing it, so you stick a SD card in and you get an USB port?

What would be the point of that? There are already 2 USB ports in the back.

@Skippy,

The point would be then you could plug in a hard drive and your wii would never know the difference. This is all assuming that the wii does not have a memory card size limit.

The Wii caps at 2 GB, I believe. Maybe 4.

It does not support SDHC.

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Rumor: Reggie promises 'storage solution' -- not a hard drive?

Reader Comments (78)

Posted: Sep 8th 2008 3:24PM SoulBlade said

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