Use an external drive with your Wii!

The weakest link with a game system like the Wii is the optical disks and drive.  With children handling the disks, they get tons of fingerprints and probably occasional scratches, and that’s if the kids are good about being careful.  I imagine some people have had to buy a second copy of a game that their children have accidentally rendered unreadable.  Add to that the fragility of the slot-loading optical drive that I recently discovered, and issues like what happened to my Wii can happen.

So, when my Wii gets back from being repaired, I’m doing this:  Load / Save Wii Games to Hard Drive

I’ve not done this yet, so what I’m posting here is my general understanding of how this works, but it seems pretty straight forward.  This “hack” basically consists of some software you install via the HomeBrew channel that lets you rip your Wii games to an external USB drive.   Then, you play them off the external drive, never needing to insert the optical disks again.  This keeps the expensive game content free of fingerprints, scratches, the possibility of getting lost, plus from what I understand it is faster to get to the game itself (since there’s no disk spin-up time).  Each game is generally between 1-2 GB, so I should be able to put about 40 games on the 80 GB drive that I removed from my G4 Mac Mini (it’s now in an external case, of course), assuming that it works with the Wii (some drives don’t).  I only have 15 games now, so that should last me for years.  If this drive doesn’t work, I have some others to try too, but I don’t feel that a 250 GB drive is appropriate for something with such a low need for storage.

Once my games are ripped, I’m planning to pack the disks in their original cases with the instructions, and put them in a locked drawer, away from the Wii.  I mean, why will I need the disks again, if they are ripped to an external drive.  (Short of drive failure, or Nintendo breaking this hack in some way with a future software update.)

If you are considering doing this because you want to pirate Wii games, then don’t bother.  Borrowing a game from a friend and ripping it this way is piracy.  So is renting it from a store and ripping it.  Buying a game, ripping it, then returning it or trading it in is still piracy.  Basically, once you no longer have the original disk, but still have the ripped copy, you are pirating the game.

If piracy grows to be rampant on any platform, the people that make a living making the games will simply switch to a more secure platform where they can make a living.  And nobody wants that.