The CD drive does matter because they vary in ability to correct errors and dig info out of scratches. The best ones are the Plextor 760's and 716's. Unfortunately these are not made any more and have to be dug out of EBay etc. Newer Plextors are outsourced gubbage.
Software is important too. EAC is ok but with 3K disks you want something more capable. Take a look at dbpoweramp. This has a lot of capability. There is a batch rip util that will process several rips in parallel depending on the capability of your computer. Basically figure that you can run as many drives in parallel as you have cores.
Getting good metadata is huge, and dbpoweramp lets you set up access to commercial services and edit the data on the fly. This will also attempt to snag album art.
Also I would recommend FLAC as the target format. There is just more software that supports it. Unfortunately the one exception to that rule is Apple, which of course is always pushing their own. Which is why I gave up on them a few years ago. But that is another story.
In any case you don't lose anything converting between lossless formats later. The big thing is to rip to lossless in the first place.
Software is important too. EAC is ok but with 3K disks you want something more capable. Take a look at dbpoweramp. This has a lot of capability. There is a batch rip util that will process several rips in parallel depending on the capability of your computer. Basically figure that you can run as many drives in parallel as you have cores.
Getting good metadata is huge, and dbpoweramp lets you set up access to commercial services and edit the data on the fly. This will also attempt to snag album art.
Also I would recommend FLAC as the target format. There is just more software that supports it. Unfortunately the one exception to that rule is Apple, which of course is always pushing their own. Which is why I gave up on them a few years ago. But that is another story.
In any case you don't lose anything converting between lossless formats later. The big thing is to rip to lossless in the first place.