Fishbone - good job, you pretty much have it figured out. Don't forget the interconnects and when you get it, conside upgrading the power cable for the DAC - they are quite sensitive to this tweak.
Figure the average album stored Apple Lossless will be about 300Mb. Put another way I have 13,029 songs in 281.39 gigs. Hard drive space is very inexpensive and you will find it cost effective to buy more storage then you need. At the end of the day its a lot less expensive to support one big drive/case etc then 2 smaller drives/cases/cables.
Don't forget an equal sized back-up hard drive - plenty of tales of woe to be found here and on Asylum from people who couldn't be bothered and lost hours of ripping... Take a look at an Apple program called ChronoSync to manage your backups.
As far as the DAC - better is better - this is after all your source. An option you might explore is a USBTD or CHIBI DAC (connects via USB) from Scott Nixon. Eliminates SPDIF and uses I2S instead. Great sound, low cost. Also hearing amazing things about a new Chinese DAC, ther Lite Audio DAC-60.
http://www.gr-research.com/components/lite_dacs.htm
Figure the average album stored Apple Lossless will be about 300Mb. Put another way I have 13,029 songs in 281.39 gigs. Hard drive space is very inexpensive and you will find it cost effective to buy more storage then you need. At the end of the day its a lot less expensive to support one big drive/case etc then 2 smaller drives/cases/cables.
Don't forget an equal sized back-up hard drive - plenty of tales of woe to be found here and on Asylum from people who couldn't be bothered and lost hours of ripping... Take a look at an Apple program called ChronoSync to manage your backups.
As far as the DAC - better is better - this is after all your source. An option you might explore is a USBTD or CHIBI DAC (connects via USB) from Scott Nixon. Eliminates SPDIF and uses I2S instead. Great sound, low cost. Also hearing amazing things about a new Chinese DAC, ther Lite Audio DAC-60.
http://www.gr-research.com/components/lite_dacs.htm