spec, explain the awesomeness of wget.
Pretty much everything you said, plus you can use -c to continue broken downloads. Not to mention that if you have a long-term download it's a lot lighter than having Firefox or whatever running.
ps spec, you really don't. I would have more, but my HD crashed, and havent been able to pay postage to return it. :\\
I know, it was more of a shock when I first looked at it. I've been trying to clean up my 400GB drive because I've been running out of space and I quickly found that half of it was taken up by torrents (note that I have several other things, like MAME disk images and about 40GB of Amiga software, that was moved elsewhere). XD So, in reality, that figure is more like 200GB, not including the unorganized stuff plastered all over my E drive (and the music on D (and my Linux drive (and the CD images that I have organized on C and F))).
I've been archiving my drive to DVDs lately. I already burned six of them and went from having 5GB free to having 40GB free. Woot!
Ultimately, I'm probably just going to have to get a big external one. I can't connect any more drives into my system without a PCI card, and I'm not going to upgrade any of my IDE drives because odds are the next board I get will only have one IDE port.
Woo, rambling!