Hi Welder

I’m a bit puzzled by some of your recommendations.

What I would also suggest is you choose a drive that has a power supply independent from a computer.
What you said about drives are well known issues.
However, these issues are about playback. This is about how electrical activity of components might have an impact on sound quality.
There are indications that these components might disturb the clock so induces ample rate jitter.
Ripping is transferring data from one digital medium (CD) to another (HD).
Inside the digital domain jitter is not an issue (we are not doing AD, only transferring data).
So I’m inclined to say rip to your local HD (fastest) unless you run out of space.

I do think most of the media players today, when set to secure mode, do produce a bit perfect rip. However, both dbPoweramp and EAC have a extra lock, AccurateRip.
This makes them almost nuke proof.

Ripping is one thing, getting your tags right is another.
I don’t see any reason to rip to 3 different formats unless you want to tag trice.
WAV is a problem, tagging support is poor due to a lack of standards so portability is very low indeed.
My preference is to rip to FLAC: lossless , excellent tagging and as a bonus a checksum. If ever the content gets corrupted, the FLAC decoder will warn you.

If you rip each track to a single file, I don’t see the use of CUE except as a strategy to overcome the tagging limitations of WAV.

Summing up
- use your media player for ripping if it can be set to secure mode (WMP, iTunes)
- if you want to be nuke proof: dbPoweramp (faster, better tagging due to AMG) or EAC (slower but free)
- Rip to 1 lossless format with excellent tagging support. As it is lossless you can always convert to any other format but first
- Correct tags, add art work where needed, etc
- Make a BACKUP