According to Nintendo, the Wii U is able to support external USB hard drives up to 3TB. In fact, you can plug in any USB flash drive or hard drive that you may have lying around and use it for storage for your Wii U. If you don’t like that option, you can also use SD/SDHC cards up to 32B for storage.

With the Wii U Nintendo believes that a wide open approach to storage is best for the consumer. It allows consumers to decide how much storage they need and what kind of storage device best suits their needs. In addition, consumers can seek out the best price for their storage needs and Nintendo does not have to mark up the storage to make money on it.

The bottom line is that while Nintendo’s approach is the most flexible, we will have to see how consumers embrace it. It is unknown how Nintendo handles the storage that you plug into the Wii U and what kind of utilities they provide to back up Wii U data onto another device. While Nintendo isn’t making money on the storage, they also don’t have to deal with the issues that go along with maintaining and backing up the storage.