Running a Monero node over TOR from external SSD hard drive with wallet

Question

Pardon my ignorance, the other day, I asked a question about setting up a Monero node and wallet on my PC. I have now decided not to do that, and instead will set up on an external SSD drive. There is over 150GBs of free space on this drive. I have no interest in using my node for mining. I will only use it for conducting my own Monero transactions. No incoming or outgoing except what is necessary for transactions.

I intend to setup a website which accepts Monero payments so I'd like to set up a suitable solution from scratch. I will be using the Monero API to accept payments to my wallet. I haven't decided yet which wallet to use as I want to practice using the system first.

I haven’t used crypto before and also I’ve read conflicting info like you shouldn’t keep the node and the wallet in the same place, and I’m not sure how hosting my node from home would affect my privacy (IP) etc. So I’m confused.

My Questions:

1. Can I set up a node and wallet using Tor, my home PC (Windows 10) and download the blockchain to an SSD hard drive?

2. Do I need to keep the blockchain download in a separate place to the wallet? If yes, should I keep the GUI on my PC instead?

3. Is there actually a url where one begins the process of downloading the blockchain?

4. For what I want to do would a GUI or CLI wallet be better? I will eventually get a cold wallet.

5. Why do I need the pruned node if I have over 150GBs of space? I would keep this SSD drive soley for the node.

6. If I wanted anonymity what would I need to do aside from using TOR browser, I mean, how to keep my IP address from showing?

Thank you in advance for help.

Answer 1

1. Yes. Both the CLI and GUI allow you to set a location for storing the blockchain.
2. No, they do not have to be on different computers.
3. You just start up the daemon and it syncs from the network. There is a URL for info on downloading the blockchain and importing it, but honestly, syncing from the network is almost always faster these days.
4. If you are comfortable on the command line, use that, if not, use the GUI. The CLI is more feature rich but the GUI has everything that most people need.
5. Up to you. There are no particular drawbacks to running a pruned node though, and it means your drive will take considerably longer to fill up.
6. You already have good anonymity using Monero. Using Tor helps further because it makes it harder to even know you are using Monero.