Have you been waiting for Nintendo’s Wii Storage Solution? The Wii System update earlier this week took us a step closer to playing games directly from SD, but you may have missed it. In addition to enhanced parental controls, USB keyboard support for the Mii Channel, and a modified privacy policy, update 3.4 boasts dramatically increased SD transfer speeds. This update marks Nintendo’s first step toward the storage solution announced in early October. If everything goes to plan, you should be able to play your WiiWare and Virtual Console games directly from SD media in spring of 2009. Hit the jump to see the new lightning quick transfer in action.
Transferring World of Goo used to three or more minutes to copy to SD card, with the new update, it only takes about thirty seconds!
Thanks to The Tanooki for the video.
the video is down
LIGHTNING QUICK!
Um…how slow was it before?
Abysmal:
For something the size of world-of-goo it would take between 3 and four minutes to transfer it – now it only takes thirty seconds! I’ve modified the original story to reflect this.
Awesome!
This is one of those things that I will never understand about Nintendo. They know we are desperately awaiting a storage solution. Any news would be good news for their fans, but they role something like this out without even making a mention of it in the update release. All they had to do was tell us that the update improved SD transfer rates and we all would have been happy as punch and given Nintendo some credit for doing something for us. Instead we just have to find it out on our own.
This sounds like I am ungrateful, but really I am just baffled by Nintendo’s indifference towards its hardcore fans. So, thumbs up for SD transfer rates increasing; thumbs down for Nintendo’s head in the sand.
Can someone clear this up please, as stated in your post it says that we will be able to run games from SD come spring. However a recent quote from Iwata san, says you will only be able to download to SD from the shop, but will still need to copy to SD to play! I know I’d like to believe Infendo’s post, but does anyone have conrete info on what we’re exactly getting come spring?? I definitely want to see download AND play from SD!!
Wow… it’s so… revolutionary…
@benmully:
I’ll look into it and see if we can’t get you some solid clarification. At the announcement in early October, it seemed clear to me that one would be able to play games from the SD card, but reputable sources seem to be giving conflicting reports.
Well, it’s faster alright. I wonder how long it is to copy the data from SD onto the Wii (read time).
Considering it takes about 4 seconds for my camera to write a 22MB file onto an SD card, i think that the seed on the Wii for World of Goo should be about 10 seconds. but reading should be faster in general.
Cheers
i’m having trouble getting into the new castlevania judgement game. i’m wondering if it has to do with this new system update since i updated right before starting up this game. i get to the title screen, but am not able to advance beyond that. anyone else had this problem. all my other games work fine.
So, when it comes to it, will the ‘Storage Solution’ be a new Wii channel that saves some space into which virtual console games stored on SD card can be quickly loaded? In other words, you effectively copy a game across to the Wii, but don’t need to worry about ‘cleaning the fridge’ because the new ‘SD channel’ handles it all for you.
That seems to make sense to me, although read/write speeds could do with being upped a bit further.
i really think the storage solution will be sdhc cards
not a bad thing otugh
yea, it’s recently been proven that lack of sdhc support is software based. With them increasing the speed, by summer next year we should have SDHC support. Guess what, you can buy an 8 gig SDHC card for $20, with te prices of 16 gig cards hovering around $40 an dstill dropping.
Well that’s kinda nice I guess. Every time I use wiipoints I have to transfer stuff. Faster is good. Why didn’t they just do this to begin with? I am excited about the possibility of SDHC support (I recently downloaded SDHC support for a Garmin GPS unit, so it should be possible like gametaku says) but really I just to play games off of my 2GB SD card. I have spent hundreds of dollars on Points cards (my downloads section of the shop channel is seven pages long) but I suspect I will still have to spend hundreds more on wiipoints to fill up my 2 GB card. So just let me play them off my card allready! C’mon is it even possible or not? Like I said faster is good, but it just pisses me off even more that faster was possible all along and they only give it to us 2 years after the fact?!?!?!?!?!? I just put a 500GB hard drive in my PS3 and I’m no savvy computer geek but it was still easy as cake. Next I’m gonna put Ubuntu on it. Wow. Meanwhile Nintendo, though they will always be #1 with me, can’t even give me 2GB to access directly?!?!?!?!?!?!?
yeah…but wat about the fact that there’s no more homebrew channel?
The Homebrew Channel is still in there. You can see it in the video.
I honestly thought that the Wii update was pointless when I recieved the notice on the message board. i thought it was only adding keyboard support on the Mii Channel (Very Pointless, there’s barely any typing there.) and the Parental Controls now being available is just as stupid. Those have been available since the launch of the system, no point in telling me what I already know. But the SD card feature I didn’t know about but it doesn’t matter as I don’t have an SD card yet for the Wii. Don’t really need one since I don’t get the opportunity to get Wii Points and download anything. In fact here’s all the stuff I’ve downloaded:
Most recent versions of the News, Weather, Mii, Wii Vote, Picture Viewer, and Nintendo Channels,
Ghosts & Goblins – NES
Super Mario Bros 2. The Lost Levels – NES
Kirby’s Adventure – NES
Double Dragon – NES
Super Metroid – SNES
Lost Winds – WiiWare
As I said I don’t get the opportunity to buy wii points cards at all. My next purchases will include Mario RPG Legend of the Seven Stars, Paper Mario, and Mega Man 9.
I’ve now had a chance to test it out. I tried Tetris Party, which is 244 blocks. Before the update on 3.3U it took 1min 48sec, after on 3.4U it took only 15secs!!! This is using the official white SanDisk SD card.
A massive improvement, BUT still want to be able to runs games from SD too!!