I recently purchased a Lexar Professional 128 GB SDXC card for experimental use in a softmodded Wii. As I discovered earlier that the Wii’s SD card slot was compatible with SDXC cards (such as the SanDisk 64 GB MicroSDXC Card via adapter), I was curious to see if the Wii was capable of reading a 128 GB SDXC card.
However, before I could test the card, I needed to format the Lexar Professional 128 GB SDXC into FAT32 format. Unfortunately, the built-in format tool in Windows 7 & 8 only allowed options to format the 128 GB SDXC card into NTFS and exFAT formats, two formats which the Wii does not support. The typical solution is to turn to a Linux system or using Gparted-Live to bypass Windows’ silly FAT32 format restriction, but as I was a bit lazy, I immediately Google’d for a large capacity FAT32 format tool for Windows. Google was indeed my friend that time, as I discovered an awesome FAT32 format tool for Windows that was simple and free, called fat32format by Ridgecrop Consultants. Kudos to the people over at Ridgecrop Consultants for creating this utility and making it free, as it did the job for formatting the Lexar Professional 128 GB SDXC into FAT32 format.
After getting the Lexar Professional 128 GB SDXC card into FAT32 format, I inserted the card into the Wii, running on the latest 4.3 firmware. I then proceeded to check the saved data menu in the Wii settings, to see if the Wii properly detected the 128 GB SDXC card.
976649 blocks free… Now that’s a lot of space for Wii saved data.
After a minute or so, the Wii finally finished it’s scan of the 128 GB SDXC card and reported that it had over 976,649 blocks free! That’s quite a bit of space for Wii saved data! For a device produced in 2006 and equipped with a SDHC slot, it’s amazing to see that it’s compatible with the latest large capacity SDXC cards.