IDE bus speed

0. Some IDE CD drives are better than others, but I've got at least one perfectly good CD that rips perfectly in a SCSI Plextor but not in any IDE drive I've tried.

You don't need very fast SCSI (a PCI Adaptec 2904 is fine). For Linux, you probably need at least a Pentium 100 with 16Mb of RAM, 32 if you want to run X on it too. For Gnome, KDE, or Windows, I'd guess more still.

Peter