using external harddrive with wii

i plan on loading a ton of iso’s into a wbfs partition on an external drive. my question is will i need to use a harddrive with a separate power cable, or will the power supplied with the usb cable be enough to safely run games without overworking the wii’s power supply? or should i just go with a handfull of flash drives? thanks guys and gals.
Answer #1
An External Drive usually has its own power Cable and usb cable
Answer #2
I have a Iomega 500GB portable hdd on my wii it is powered by usb and works no probs nearly 200 games on it and its 80% full.
Answer #3
depends on the external drive
as and gazman already said, both variants are possible. here are 2 examples of external drives :
with external PS :
http://www.amazon.de/Elements-Desktop-externe-Festplatte-Zoll/dp/B004WRG7E0/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1389096744&sr=8-7&keywords=external+hard+drive

Bus powered :
http://www.amazon.de/Sony-HDE1S-CASE-1000-GB/dp/B00AQXO2PK/ref=sr_1_107?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1389096909&sr=1-107&keywords=external+hard+drive

Answer #4
I put a Barracuda in an external case that works fine (own power supply).
If you use the latest version of Wiiflow you don’t need to create a WBFS partition, just leave it as NTFS or FAT32(or ExFAT), just let WiiBackupManager or whatever you use create a WBFS folder.