Best standalone music server?

So I thought I would at least give exact audio copy a try out on my pc, but after the results I am going to assume it is very dependant on age/speed of pc and drive etc as results were very poor tbh.
The very first cd i loaded ( polyester zeal by red sun rising) it did not find the metadata, however it was easy to edit and add myself.
Then it took 17 minutes to rip as wav files.
I did a compare with windows media player which not only found the metadata right away but ripped to same wav format in 7 minutes.
Files were ripped to the pc,s own internal hard drive, is it possible to get these fast EAC rip speeds it would need to be ripped to an external drive or is because my cranky old hp all in one is just too old and slow?

I listed to both versions through my tv which feeds via toslink into my esoteric into my arc into my bat and could not tell any difference.
Obviously this is less than state of the art but all I had to experiment with right now.

@uberwaltz I would very seriously recommend getting dbpoweramp or similar ripping software that will allow you to rip flac and not wav files. You will be grateful that you did wav files are very large relative to flac and to me at least sound identical.

@jond 
Oh I agree totaly on the flac vs wav point
Just pointing out the fact that on my computer it took twice as long with the EAC software compared to windows media player on same format of wav.
I truly think my old pc and drives are more the stumbling block on rip speed

In fact I think I have dbpoweramp on my work laptop just to play music back on those long nights in the hotel while away for work

Maybe your test would be different with FLAC, both should go faster. FYI, flac does much better with metadata than WAV. Cheers,
Spencer