What are you using to rip your cds to a hard drive?


I had been using the cd drive in my old laptop to rip cds to my external hard drive.  I have since bought a new laptop that does not have a cd drive.  To get a cd into the computer I am using a cheap external disc reader.  What are you guys using to spin those silver discs into hard drives?  I think I need something better than what I have, but I don't think I want to spend thousands of dollars to buy a disc drive.  My budget would be less than $1,000,

What do you think?

kenrus
I am using an MF Digital Ripstation with dbpoweramp and use the batch ripping function.  I am able to rip up to 60 CD's per hour using this system which utilizes four CD-ROM drives which are indexed and provides bit perfect accurate rips.  I use GD3 as my metadata provider which provides me with accurate metadata and cover art for all of my CD's.  I have used this for a few years now and have ripped about 7K CD's. 

I completely rebuilt the machine with new drives new motherboard, memory, cpu and current version of Windows 64 bit.  This allows much faster throughput than the factory setup which is 32 bit and lets me rip virtually 2X as many discs per hour.  I frequently purchase used CD's in large quantities to get a very reasonable price for them and have ripped as many as 1500 CD's in about 3 days doing nothing more than watching the machine load the CD's and check the cover art.  The only thing that takes some time is removing and reinserting the CD's in the jewel cases and cleaning each CD briefly with a microfiber cloth. 


one feature that is really nice (YMMV) is the dbPoweramp ability to rip the CD and do multiple things with that rip.  Example we rip and then save as FLAC, mp3 (highish bit rate), and MP3 lowish bit rate for players and phone.  so one rip and 3 different copies for different uses.  if this is important to you it may be worth consideration.  computeraudiophile has some helpful materials on this topic.  

luck.