Downloading directly to an external hard drive?

[SacredOwl]

Hello i have just ordered my RPi and i was wondering if i can download torrents directly to a USB connected external hard drive? Im assuming this will work since there is only the SD card memory available on the Pi itself?
Also will this be any slower than downloading to an internal hard drive?
Thanks

[Nr90]

I don't think this should be a problem.

I believe the USB and ethernet share bandwith, so your theoretical max speed is slower when combining both, however I assume this is going to be lower then your download speed anyway.

[abishur]

You'll have to mount it first (be that manual or via editing fstab to automount at boot), but yes, you absolutely can save files directly to a usb attached device. Technically if you had it mounted you could save files directly to a network share. As for will it be faster or slower than internal memory (there is no internal hard drive, just an SD card)... well that depends on the speed of your SD card. At the end of the day it should be fairly comparable.

[SacredOwl]

Thank you both for your answers, they told me everything i need

[CyrusVx]

Hi, this is just an add-on question regarding this topic.
What should the file system be for the external drive connected to the RPi?

[abishur]

Hi, this is just an add-on question regarding this topic.
What should the file system be for the external drive connected to the RPi?

I think the pi can handle just about any filesystem you throw at it. I personally like using ext4. I've used NFS in the past, but ran into big trouble when my linux box died and couldn't mount it on a windows machine (there are some programs that let you more or less make use of the ext file system on windows), but there no need to reformat your drive just to get it to run on the pi... I don't think.