Laptop ripping station

[conovera]

I just acquired a Lenovo T60p and want to enlist it to rip 2500+ CDs in library. Looking to add external storage via eSATA, external burner via USB or eSATA and external USB sound card to receive analog in for tape library/vinyl conversion. Looking for suggestions to preserve quality, maximize productivity and provide safe backups. Anyone with suggestions or experience using Icy Dock or Addionics external storage units? Good USB CD burners? External audio cards. I want to do this project once and do it right. Thanks for any advice.

 

[conovera]

Plan so far is buy a pair of 750G drives, connect via an expresscard eSATA device to act as main library, then make full backups and the second drive and spirit it off to work (where it may be put into use via USB connection to Zpro for playback). I don't want to tax my laptop's internal burner, so wanted to burn through an external drive connected either through the eSATA or USB connections. Problem would be that the expresscards only have 2 ports that I would need for the 2 750 drives. So I wondering whether burning on an external drive via USB through laptop and saving out to 750G eSATA would offer the necessary throughput to churn through a mountain of music. I haven't decided ripping format yet, but may be compressed as low as 192AAC. The Addionics box would allow 4-5 drives + burner to mount in a separate enclosure with shared powersource and cooling, but I'm not totally comfortable with using a eSATA port multiplier at this point unless others have had good experiences with it. I may just buy a couple of separate Icy Docks and loading 750s in each and using them alternately via eSATA and USM. Anyone see any potential hiccups with this approach?