All hail! The long desired solution to the limited nature of the Wii’s internal 512MB storage is with us! But then you all know by now, of course, that the latest Wii system update now allows for Wii Ware / Virtual Console games to be downloaded directly to and loaded from SD cards. I also need not repeat to you that the Wii now also supports SDHC cards which means up to 32GB of storage compared to the 2GB limit of standard SD.

Right.. that aside.. how well does this actually work? Llylat Wars was already on my SD card so load away I did! Well… attempted to at least but alas not enough space on the internal memory to load it. So the game / channel is loaded from the SD to the internal memory for running. Clunky yes but still beats a proprietary Wii USB hard drive cost-wise. So now I’m loading all my downloaded content to the SD Card.

This may take a few moments… bear with me…

Right. Done. Now for what counts – load times! For this testing my Wii currently has a standard San Disk 2GB SD card. The times listed are from clicking ‘Start’ to the game being on-screen.

Pac Man (NES) – 24 Blocks, 14 seconds

Super Mario World (SNES) – 34 Blocks, 15 seconds

Mario RPG (SNES) – 64 Blocks, 17 seconds

Lylat Wars (N64) – 148, 19 seconds

World Of Goo – 319 Blocks, 29 seconds

Now it’s entirely possible that a Class 6 SCHC (i.e. 6MB/s speed) may run the show a bit quicker but I was very impressed. World Of Goo is the biggest game I have and a 30 second load time is fine by me (takes me that long to rummage a disc game out of it’s case and into the Wii anyway). When loading a nice blue progress bar stops the whole “is… is it working” thing, good times.

I have to say I’m very very impressed. I expected much longer load times on the bigger games. Nintendo, I applaud your efforts and I applaud you all the more for not using this as an opportunity to sell us a probably over-priced hard drive accessory ^_^

Now then… question is this: Will load times be faster on a Class 6 (i.e. 6MB/s) SDHC card? Shall get one ordered and run the same games off it and report back. For now though, happy return to downloading!