So you want to run AWIPS II, and you want to feed it with whatever data you can, using as few resources as possible. COMEST to the rescue!
Right now, the only thing that matters is ahget.py. Run it as your awips user, as EDEX will be confused if it does not have write access to files added to /awips2/edex/data/manual, not to mention that a non-awips user probably does not have write access to that directory.
From a fresh start, assuming you aren't bandwidth-constrained, all products for two sites should download in a little under two minutes. It keeps track of all URLs it has fetched, so that the next time it runs it can skip those. If you run it once every five minutes, subsequent runs will probably take something like 20 seconds. If you are using Windstream DSL, be prepared to wait a while.