I ordered this hard drive to start a digital collection of Wii U games and it works well for that purpose. The drive wasn't even recognized with the included USB cable and required a Y-cable in order to be formatted and used. It has a tendency to go to sleep when not in use for a few minutes, as when using Netflix or Wii mode, but this isn't a problem during gameplay, where the drive is actively read and written to.
I measured the read speed on PC at about 80mb/s (sequential) when using USB 3.0. Using the same USB 2.0 Y-cable connection Wii U uses, the speed dropped to 34mb/s for a sequential read and 23mb/s for a random read, both of which are faster than the 22.5mb/s speed of Wii U discs.
In-game, I saw an average reduction in loading times of 6 seconds for Mariokart 8 tracks and 1-2 seconds for Pikmin 3 trials (there was no change in the initial game boot time in either case). In general, the drive is fast and performs better than using a disc, but it does read very slowly at system startup, which reduces the usefulness of Wii U's "quick start" feature. It's also not as fast as the Wii U's internal flash memory, which loaded Bit Trip Runner 2 and Nano Assault Neo levels about 3-4 seconds faster (but that's to be expected from a SSD).
It's a shame that the full USB 3.0 speed capabilities of HDDs can't be utilized on Wii U, but this drive still loads faster than an optical disc and works reliably. Aside from the sluggish performance at boot-up, I'm very happy with this drive.
| Hard Drive | 500 GB Portable |
|---|
