best external drive for ripping CDs

The LG looks good. I have always liked the Pioneer internal and external drives. 

@noske Are you a lawyer? I’m asking, because the piece I quoted is, as I mentioned, from Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) - an organization that represent recording industry in the United States. This very organization has powerful lawyers and will go after you in case of infringement.

I’m not sure what contradictions you found, but basically it says that in case of copying CDs you are allowed to copy any music into Audio CD-R or music you own into plain CD-R. In both cases royalties are paid. Manufacturers of Audio CD-Rs pay small amount per Audio CD-R to RIAA.

Getting back to original question: ripping is different from playing. When you play CD CDP, working in real time, can only go over each sector once. It can correct missing data caused by scratches along the track to about 4mm long, For longer scratches it will interpolate data and that might affect the sound.
When ripping it can go over each sector multiple times until proper checksum is obtained. For badly scratched CDs it can take hours, but it will recover data. The only difference between drives might be the time to do it or the level of disk damage that it can recover. For most CDs any mechanism will do. Program is more important here. Programs such as Itunes don’t make too many attempts and don’t even have settings for amount of tries nor they report final result. Most of specialized programs will report if CD was ripped without error and some will allow to set limits of attempts (otherwise it can go forever). Currently I use XLD on Mac, but before eI used Max where I set limit of attempts to 200. Program instructed CD reader to go over each sector up to 200 times to obtain proper checksum.
Getting better mechanism always help, but it is not as important as CDP for playback in most (99%) cases.

@jbuhl 

I use this: https://www.nch.com.au/rip/index.html?ns=true&kw=express%20rip&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIyNLdwM7l_AIV_zizAB3d4wHgEAAYASAAEgKli_D_BwE

Best on the market and it's the fastest. The internal drive I use is server-grade. And that just means it's more reliable than the ultra-mass produced cheap drives.

There are multiple ripping software programs that use the AccurateRip database to verify the CD content checksums.  DBPowerAmp is perhaps the best & best known.  Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is free (donations gladly accepted) and also uses AccurateRip.

Note that AccurateRip verification is not always possible, as the database is built from volunteer submissions.  This means that confidence in the comparison increases with the number of identical results submitted for the exact release you're ripping.