One of the biggest complaints about Wii has always been the lack of sufficient storage.  Those looking to fill their Wii consoles full of Virtual Console and WiiWare goodness have often found frustration as their meager internal memory allotments were quickly full, leaving them to the cumbersome task of "deletion and more deletion".  The company had been promising a solution was forthcoming, and it seems that while most of us were sleeping, they finally delivered and have announced their breakthrough at this year's GDC - As of now the Wii can read data off of SD memory cards.

When you install the latest system update the Wii Channel menu will show a new Channel called "SD Card".

This means you no longer have to swap Virtual Console/WiiWare games onto the Wii memory in order to play them, leaving the millions of Wii owners out there free to download to their hearts content.  Glad to see Nintendo step up to fix this issue, which for some remained one of the most frustrating limitations of the console.

The new firmware will also add support to high capacity cards which are able to hold up to 32 GB of data.

The Wii System Menu 4.0 update is available now. Let the downloading begin.