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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

I think what’s worse is flash lifespan. You can recap, but can you find replacements for failed flash? Can you reimage it with the correct data? Can you even access the flash, which may be buried inside a chip somewhere?

Plastic may get brittle but I think modern plastics do this less than 90s plastics.

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This has been sort of a problem already in the Wii U community as some units have a less reliable NAND chip. For that console the community has developed the ability to emulate the NAND chip with an SD card. Proper NAND replacements are possible too but obviously more work and more risk and I think you may have needed to dump your encryption keys beforehand. Potentially it can be fixable but for some consoles like the Xbox Series line that we know very little about it may not be.

This explains all those lots of "untested" WiiU's I see for sale.

To be fair to the Wii U it does need a non-standard power adapter and the Game Pad is necessary to do things like change the video output. It is harder to test than say a PS3 Phat. IIRC the white 8GB Wii Us tend to have more robust NAND chips.

I was surprised that the “fix” for the failed storage module in my slim 4GB Xbox 360 was to tear it down and remove the storage module. It isn’t usually that easy.

I am also impressed they managed to use worse flash than the 15 year old $10 USB 2.0 drive I plugged in as a replacement.

Yes, it was one of those projects you see what you still have in the bin. Hey, this one is period correct!

unfortunately you need hot air for most slim motherboards if the 4GB NAND fails. only trinity revisions (early slims) have the pluggable module

Sounds like I won a lottery I didn’t know I was entering.

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