Ripping CD's to hard drive

+1 for Exact Audio Copy, +1 for dbpoweramp (which can do more if you want). These two are really all you need. Almost any computer grade drive can work. This is OLD technology now. Even a $30 computer optical drive is up to the task on clean, relatively unscratched discs. Bypassing crappy Windows though is key, hence the use of those two programs noted above.

Storage is cheap these days. If you are going to all the trouble to rip your discs, at least do them in FLAC so you’ll be "one and done" and not come back next year and wish you hadn’t ripped them to a lossy format.

Some even argue that it is better to rip to wav files, but wav offers no easy way of adding metadata or easy database sorting while FLAC does. If you don’t care about making the file size smaller say using FLAC level 8 (the best), you could always rip to FLAC level 0, which has no compression at all, but retains the ability to hold metadata. I guess ALAC isn’t bad either.

Various programs can help you with importing the metadata. I use mp3tag (which despite its name, also works for FLAC and ALAC). It can often find and import the album information and cover art from various online repositories like Discogs. (Don't trust iTunes. It sucks at this and often misidentifies CDs). 

My nephew paid his then 13-year-old kid a dollar for every 10 CDs he ripped. Best bargain he ever got. The kid got wise later and wanted $30 for mowing the yard.

I chose the Innuos Zen Mk3 Streamer because I saw it as well designed 

three box solution. Streams, Rips, Stores. Had it now for 3 years and still

love it. Their CS is exceptional too. About $3,200 now I think.

Use a computer application to rip from an attached cd drive to a storage drive. Do you have a computer? What kind? No need to worry about fancy equipment on front end for ripping.

Fre:ac works extremely well and pulls in meta data better than eac.

It requires a decent machine (cheap if refurbished), foobar2000 (free), and the drive to learn how to use it (also free). That’s it. Then you can rip away into any format, bit depth or sample rate you want.

ps don't rip to an HD; use a fast SSD, M2 if possible. If you can't boot M2, mount one on a caddy and put it on the PCIE bus for music storage. The fast access will leave more time for your music processing. And foobar2000 has a ramdisk component so you can put your tracks into RAM for even faster access.