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.