use an sd or usb stick instead of an hdd?

is it possible to use like a 16gb sd card or usb thumb drive to load games on your wii? i guess my external doesn't work with my wii. it's about 6 years old maxtor 120gb. my friend has an sd card and a thumb drive that are big enough to fit a few games on it. i was wondering if you absolutely had to use an external hard drive cause i did not want to spend the money on a new one.

in configurable usb loader, you can change the settings so it looks in SD not in HD, but the SD has to be partioned to WBFS etleast part of it does.
Thanks, Alex.

thanks alex