With the Wii U‘s November 18th launch date closing in, Nintendo has revealed some troubling information for future owners of the Basic model who thought they might be able to get by with console’s 8GB of internal storage.
During a Nintendo Direct video presentation yesterday, The Big N confirmed that the Basic and Premium models of the Wii U will have 7.2GB and 29GB of usable space respectively. The problem with this amount of available internal storage is that when the console is turned on for the first time it will use 4.2GB to set up the Nintendo Network ID and account information. This means that Wii U Basic owners will be left with a mere 3GB of space for future downloads, save files, updates, or whatever else they decided to put on the console.
To put some perspective on just how small that 3GB of space is, New Super Mario Bros. U is about 2GB in size, Nintendo Land is 3.2GB, and Wii U discs can hold a total of 25GB of data.
What this all boils down to is this, if you own the Basic Wii U model (and Nintendo follows through with their plans to have a more robust online system for the console) you will be forced to expand the console’s 3GB storage capacity with a USB external hard drive much sooner than you may have been expecting to.
It should also be noted that USB Flash Memory devices do work with the system, however, “games do not run properly” on them. This means that external hard drives, up to 2TB in capacity, are the only real solution to increase the Wii U‘s storage capacity.
Source: Kotaku
