Ripping CD's to hard drive

What I use:

Express Rip

by NCH software. It’s guaranteed to be bit-perfect to kbs (killobytes).

Strangely, the same original CD-Rs ripped using Windows Media Player long ago resulted in less kbs. (overall file size) and there was a haze (almost like noise) over some tracks; whereas Express Rip was just perfect. Brand new CD-Rs were used.

Also invest in a standalone external drive or a server-grade optical drive if you’re using a desktop computer. A SSD solid state drive would be best for music. SATA III is fine, but there is even better/faster available. Hard Drives make noise. Nobody uses them anymore.

@cjlundberg

My suggestion would be to pick up a used Bluesound Vault 2 which will serve as CD ripper, storage and streamer/DAC. One box, that does it all. And choose .wav format to rip your CD’s. How many CD’s are you looking to rip? Vault has 2TB storage which can store roughly 2856 CDs.

I owned Vault 2 for 5 years before moving on to Aurender ACS100, which offers much superior App interface to curate, metadata edits and access to my CD collection, all from iPad. 

Sony Music Center and its free:

I should back up...newbie question...what type of CD drive is necessary/sufficient?  Right now I've got a Cambridge CXC transport running into an integrated with a built in DAC.  I'm guessing the CXC won't be useful in this situation.  I should have prefaced the original question that I'm completely new to this and want to know what the complete chain looks like (hardware that reads/exports data to hardware that decodes and stores it).  Any input is appreciated.