Without spending a ton of money, the fastest ripping drive I've found is the Kenwood True-X line. The True-X drives maintain their speed across the entire disc (most drives slow to less than half speed by the time they reach the end of the disc). My True-X is a 62X and it typically does DAE at 32X (I've seen over 35X). Running Audio Catalyst (most audiophiles don't like it's mp3 encoder), I can rip and compress at 27X. The limiting factor is my CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1500. If I set the rip method to "dynamic sync width", then it never skips, but the rip speed is slowed down to 16X (by the drive syncing, not CPU limited).

It takes me less than 2.5 minutes to rip & mp3 compress a CD that's over an hour long! I'm quite happy with the sound quality of the VBR set one notch up from the middle (averages ~150Kbps). If you're more concerned about sound quality, don't use Audio Catalyst.

Keep in mind that this drive is quite old (I've had mine for over a year) and you can also get Kenwood's 72X True-X drive that does DAE even faster (in case you've got a CPU >2GHz).