image

At the beginning of this month, reports came stating that leaving your Wii U dormant could cause the system to die a slow and painful death.

We initially heard that the Wii U suffers from a NAND corruption issue, which could end up bricking the system. All you had to do is not use your Wii U for a decent amount of time for the issue to potentially crop up. Now we’re finding out some more details on the situation, and there’s more to things than we first thought.

Every Wii U has a NAND chip, and it was created by either Hynix, Samsung, or Toshiba. There’s only two ways to know which chip is inside your Wii U; opening it up to find the chip or running homebrew. If you happen to find that you have a Hynix chip, it could mean you’re in for some bad luck.

Apparently Hynix NAND chips are dying much quicker than those from Samsung or Toshiba. In other words, if you have a Wii U with Samsung or Toshiba NAND chips, you should be okay. If there’s a Hynix chip inside, you better cross your fingers and toes that things keep working!

Add Comment

Comments (5)

lionk

1y ago

Ah really...? I hope Nintendo will offer to do a chip replacement for the people with issues here. I decided to wait and see what happens here with fingers crossed.

On a sidenote, yesterday we finished Pikmin 3 (on Wii U) for the first time which was AwEsOmE!


kuribo

1y ago

I saw somewhere that a potential non-invasive indicator might the colour of the Wii U power port on the console. If you have a YELLOW power port you might be at risk, but if you have a BLACK port there is a good chance you don’t have Hynix NAND chip.

AFAIK, the yellow ports were older/original models so launch window people are most at risk.

The only way to tell for sure what chip you have is to open the console or mod it like you said RMC.


smasher89

1y ago

@kuribo

Ouch, i've got a yellow port, now I wonder what i should do with that information.
Last i checked there was no issue, but now i know there might be a bigger risk!

Edited 1 time

tendonin

1y ago

@lionk

AFAIK they already stopped doing Wii U repairs (since before this issue cropped up). Can only hope a third-party solution appears at some point. Don't know how technically plausible that is.

Edited 1 time

To be sure you might need to crack up the Wii U casing. Yellow port isn’t definitive from what I red but it indicates the older hardware revision.