4GB non-SDHC SD Cards do work with in the Wii
On quite a few different forums the statement was made that a 4GB SD card would not work on the Wii, without stating any reason why the Wii couldn’t read a 4GB card. I decided to test this for myself.
Tool used;
Card used: Transcend 133x 4GB Model# TS4GSD133 NewEgg Link
Command line (format h: /fs:fat): This allowed me to format partitions greater then 2GB with fat16 in XP, “h:” of course being my SD drive
Partition Magic 9: For general partitioning and resizing partitions
Wii items tested with;
Wii Data Management
Copying the Wii Sports Save
HBC
Snes9x emulator
FTPII
Guitar Fun
MPlayer
What I found;
1. The default format of the card (3,815MB or 3,991,941,120KB) was not readable* by the Wii Data Management, but seems to be fully read/write in HBC.
2. Repartitioning the card to (3,812MB or 3,989,635,072KB) made it readable* by the Wii Data Management, although it will not let you copy saves from the Wii to the SD card and will not display the space left, but seems to be fully read/write in HBC. Copying from the SD to the Wii does work.
3. Partitions bigger then 2,102.23MB lose the ability to copy saves from the Wii to the SD card and you lose the ability to see the remaining space on the card in Wii Data Management. Copying from the SD to the Wii does work.
4. Fat32 or Fat16 does not seem to make much of a difference in whether or not the Wii can read the card.
*By readable I mean that the Wii recognized there was a SD card in the drive.
Link to my spread sheet with different partition/formatting settings;
Spread Sheet
Closing Thoughts;
The Wii potentially has a static number hard coded in it for the maximum amount of free space blocks to expect and when your SD card contains more of these said blocks it your Wii says screw you when you try and copy a save to the SD card. So yes, 4GB do work in the Wii. Potentially this could also be true for SDHC cards, but I don’t have one to test.
-FTen
March 24th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Hi! I’m currently researching the use of 4GB cards on the Wii in order to make using the DVD Dumper via SD a little more tolerable for those who don’t have their Wii on a network (for making backups of their games). What I need to know is what version of the HBC, snes9x and ftpii were you using (i.e. pre-SDHC support)? All three of these currently have SDHC support, so if they did in your test, then it’s kind of irrelevant. I’m currently assuming that if the Wii can acknowledge it, then it should work with all homebrew, but I would like to make sure. Also, have you tested any other 4GB non-SDHC cards?
March 24th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Yeah all the versions were pre-SDHC support. I actually have only ever used a 4GB Non-SDHC card with all my homebrew. The only Homebrew application that I’ve had issues with reading a 4GB card is the Twilight Princess/HBC install. It can’t find the .dol file on cards bigger then 2GB.
I’ve only tested the one 4GB Non-SDHC card.