March 29^th, 2006 (7:40pm) - Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has revealed in a recent interview with CNN that the Nintendo Revolution will be able to use a large number of third party storage options for its downloadable Virtual Console games, and possibly game saves. This possibility is opened up due to the inclusion of the two USB ports featured on the back of the Revolution game console. According to Iwata, "practically any storage method can be used."

Unlike the PlayStation 3 and original Xbox, the Revolution will not feature an internal hard drive, but will instead allows gamers to use the console’s 512MB of flash memory, in addition to its SD memory card support (which itself allows users to store gigs of memory). However, Nintendo isn’t limiting users to just these two storage options. In fact, its leaving the storage option of the console up to the consumer, who could easily go out and purchase an 160GB external hard drive for $60 using a rebate from Circuit City, from manufacturer Seagate, which is quite the bargain compared to the $100 used to purchase a 20GB hard drive add-on for the Xbox 360.

However, the use of such storage mediums has led many to believe that this leaves Nintendo’s Revolution open to piracy, as it did for the original Xbox, allowing users to download whole games off the internet and keep them stored on their hard drives. Knowing Nintendo’s strong stance against piracy, we should expect for Nintendo to take many security precautions, but the possibilities still exist.