Hardware Broken disc drive - Wiiu still usable?

[ThaDraGun]

Someone I know has a Wiiu and their kid stuck something in the drive and broke it. For quite a while they were only using it as a Netflix box. Now they don't use it at all.

I saw on here that Wiiu can be modded. So I was thinking it shouldn't matter if the disc drive is broken if you mod it and run games off an external hard drive. I never use the drive on my Wii.
I asked if they would sell it to me cheap.

Am I right that it will be fine without the drive? Just wanted to make sure before I buy it since sometimes you still need a good drive for mods to work.

 

[XDM]

theirs plenty to do with a wii u without a disk drive, you can go full digital once you connect a external hard drive, you can mod it and install homebrew and games you own straight to the hard drive or system if its small, if your a pc gamer you can backup your nand and insert it to cemu and play the games you own on your computer in hd