concerns about Gamecube emu with Wii USB Loader GX

[donssword]

I know modern external drives will auto park the needle as soon as it senses power going down (or completely off) using residual power in the drive.
You should be fine, unless your using an older HDD (perhaps an old laptop drive converted to external, that might have issues auto shutting down).

Well that's the thing. I'm using a repurposed 750GB Seagate Blue laptop drive and its powered off the Wii's USB.

Would an external power supply remediate this for me?

If I was just doing Wii games, this wouldn't be a problem, but I really want to do GameCube games as well, and there is no way around requiring a full shutdown to get out of a GameCube game--it's built into the GameCube DNA--unless I'm missing something here. And I don't care what Google tells u, there is no back to Wii home key combo that works on Wavebirds--if there is, tell me now and I'll start using it immediately.

And, this becomes a problem playing GameCube discs on my Wii, because again, u have to force shut down to get out of a GameCube game even on a disc, which force shuts down the attached USB drive.

And how do I research if a drive is self parking?

[Ziggy]

I'm not exactly sure, but I think powered external drives will park themselves once it looses communication. So you'd power off your Wii, the drive would detect the lost connection and stop spinning / park the arm, then you can power off the drive.

But powering on and off a second piece of hardware is annoying, which is why I go with a USB powered drive in the first place (I'm assuming that's why everyone else does too).