Categories
Storage

Adding a 1TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim HDD to my Wii U (or: How I hacked a USB 2.0 cable.)

The last article I wrote about was a review of 1TB portable USB 3.0 hard drives. During this review, I tested each drive with a variety of computers and other devices that had USB ports, including my Nintendo Wii and Wii U consoles. Part of this review was trying to answer the question of “Which is the best hard drive for the Nintendo Wii U?” — which I couldn’t definitively answer. I found that all of these slim 1TB drives worked just fine with the old Nintendo Wii (the previous generation console), but only 1 of them worked with the Wii U (the most current Nintendo console.)

wii-u+some-hard-driveWell, I should say that only 1 of the drives almost worked with the Wii U. That is, until I figured out a clever hack to get it to work reliably.

Categories
Storage

How to replace the DVD drive in your Nintendo Wii

If you have had your Nintendo Wii for a while now, there is a good chance that it has just stopped reading discs or is having great difficulty or has gotten very noisy. Sometimes a laser lens cleaner disc will fix it, but often times it doesn’t. You *could* send it back to Nintendo, but they’ll charge you an arm and a leg to fix it.

Fortunately, you can replace the drive yourself for ~$35. It’s not hard to repair a Wii. If you can handle a screw driver and are gentle with things, you should have no problem replacing the drive.