1. Read/write speeds don't especially matter. Read speeds will almost always be better than the original disc unless you buy an ultra cheapy 1.0 drive.
2. Not really. Just buy from a decent brand, don't cheap out, and make sure it's on the compatibility list. Though, being a flash drive, there's always the possibility that it dies suddenly, corrupts, hell even rendered unusable.
3. 3.0 is supposed to be backwards compatible, but it causes issues occasionally nonetheless.
4. These both look alright.

​

If you want something reliable, dependable, and safe to store your Wii backups on?

​

Don't buy a flash drive. Plain and simple. They cause issues in Nintendont, the Wii sometimes just corrupts them, sometimes completely kills them. This is because of the several read-write cycles that the Wii does to the drive when playing a game from it. Hard drives do not have this issue. They're faster, more reliable, and have a lot more storage per dollar.

​

Flash drives are not good in the aspect that they don't hold up very well to extreme usage that happens when playing a Wii game from them. They will die faster than a hard drive.

​

Hard drives don't always have to be huge and ugly. You can tuck it behind the console, under the cabinet, inside a cupboard, whatever you've got to do. They've gotten really small in recent years; you can get something like this that is both aesthetically pleasing and very small.