I have ripped my entire CD collection of over 4000 discs so speed and convenience were of paramount importance. It took me over two years to do it. Here are the tools I used and why:
Laptop PC and External Drive - I ripped the files to an external 4 TB SATA drive. It's important that the PC and the drive both have SATA 3 interfaces. This isn't because it affects the ripping speed but it is critical when backing up that drive to other external drives. I have the original drive and two backups. If I ever lose this data I will have to call the suicide hotline.
Plextor Plexwriter PX-891SAF-PLUS-R Burner Drive - When I started my project I was using the internal drive of my ASUS ROG gaming laptop. It was painfully slow and I read that using a Plextor external CD drive would be much faster. OMG! - it is faster by a factor of 3 or 4. The speed difference is huge depending on the CD. If you have a lot of discs to rip this is an absolute requirement. Best 45 bucks I ever spent.
OWC Pro 5.25" Drive Enclosure - Because this was such a big project I bought the best hardware I could find. This is an excellent durable enclosure and costs about 60 bucks. That's more than the stupid drive but I'm a big spender.
dB Poweramp - After a considerable amount of research I settled on dB Poweramp. It has several features that I felt were critical: 1) It has the option of ripping an uncompressed FLAC file. Even though FLAC is a lossless codec I didn't want to take any chances on quality. By ripping uncompressed files the CPU of the playback device doesn't have to work as hard. Drive space is cheap and I ain't takin' any chances. 2) It compares your rip to a database to insure that it is completely accurate. 3) It fetches the metadata from the internet so you have the album info and the artwork all together in one folder. 4) It recognizes HDCD discs (you have to enable this feature) and rips them at 20 bits to take advantage of their higher dynamic range. I have several hundred HDCDs and this feature was critical to me. 5) It's easy to use.
I still have my CDs and I have compared at least a couple dozen of them to the ripped files using the same DAC. I'm using a PSA PerfectWave Mk II DAC and a PerfectWave transport. I haven't been able to hear any difference between the original CD and the FLAC file.
If you only have a few CDs to rip then it doesn't matter as much what you use but if you have a large CD collection putting together a good ripping rig will save you countless hours of tedium.