OK, I'm not trying to be a smartass here but when I said I was ripping my CD's I meant that I was recording them from the CDRW to the Hard Drive.

That said, why would you buy this thing in the first place if you didn't have an extensive CD collection?

Secondly, why would it matter how noisy the drive is (and the maxtor 120GB is pretty quiet) since the only time the drive should be running is when you're playing or recording music (this is an assumption here) in which case it wouldn't matter anyway because you'd have the volume turned up (to hear the music of course). It's not like a replay or tivo that constantly keeps the drive going because it's constantly recording.

And I WISH that it *only* took hours to rip my CD's to the HD; more like days. Of course, I could have opted to copy them via a slow lan connection at 128kbps (since I had most of the cd's recorded already) but I opted for the highest quality 320kbps (it should sound better than 128kbps right?) and 96kbps portable (to feed my ?riot? and rio 800).

Cheers!

Jerz