I'm researching hard drives for the Wii U, and I come across high failure rates for many models. So if you purchase, say, five retail games as downloads and your hard drive fails, are you out of luck or can you redownload them to a new hard drive?

The account is still tied to your WiiU system, so every purchase you've made on the eShop will be saved. This means that you should be able to re-download all the content that gets lost if the HDD dies over again on a new HDD or the system itself.

I don't know if this actually IS how it works though. So don't take my word for it.

Correctomondo compadre