About 2 weeks ago YouTube channel Will It Work tried something very interesting with a Wii-U. They used a DVD burner on it just like you would use a USB drive on the Wii-U. What was surprising was it actually worked, but there’s a catch it only works with DVD-RAM.
The Wii-U sees the DVD burner as a mass storage device when plugged in. It can do this only with DVD-RAM because they work more as a hard drive would. A DVD-RAM disc can be formated to what the console OS recognizes just like a USB drive or SD card would work on the console. Now, I wouldn’t recommend using this way to store your data but it’s still really neat to see a game console use a DVD drive like that. You can check out the whole video below.