Granted most of us have already ripped our CD collections and are now just ripping a few CDs at a time, but if you were looking at ripping a huge stack of CDs what would you select for your hardware.
Oh, and try and keep it realistic, no real point in having dual Xeons when they'll be sitting idle waiting for the next track to rip.

Well, if you had dual Xeons, you could run two instances of LAME in the background while EAC ripped your discs. You wouldn't even have to wait for the encoding to be done before starting on the next disc. I'd say lots of hard drive space, lots of CPU, whatever that might mean for you. And a fast-ripping CDROM drive.

if you were looking at ripping a huge stack of CDs what would you select for your hardware.

Rio Central.

I would just use my regular old machine (or even my trusty P166 which has ripped more CDs than I can even think of). Why? Because I'm not *around* enough to swap CDs fast enough to keep the the dual Xeons' busy. Casually ripping CDs on my Athlon 1.4 (no XP, aka: "C", right?) while doing other things on the machine was the most efficient use of my time, anyway. Worked for me.

But I also had my P166 and whatever machine was on my work bench ripping straight to my main hard drive over the network. My bottleneck was CDRom read, so with 3 CDRoms working, it maximized throughput for me.

Oh, and try and keep it realistic,

How is that supposed to be fun?

I'd use something like this with one of these running cdparanoia and lame on linux. I'd probably need some storage to go with that, but I guess that you'd already have some recommendations.

Yeah, genixia I'd have some opinions on what to use for storage and I don't even think Paul could file on of thoes Beasts.

I've been wondering if one of these could be rigged to just replace the CD everytime it ejects the tray.
The ripping software would just blindly grab the first CDDB entey (this would mean you'd later have to check all the tags for errors, ah well) and the encoder would churn away in the background.
I don't know which is faster, cdparanoia ripping with the best CD drives or LAME encoding on a decent CPU - anyone?

Of course if you go this one hooked up to one PC running for instances of cdparanoia you'd definitly need the Xeons to chew away at the queue of WAVs.