If I'm understanding the post, the big pain here is the repetitive task of ripping a large volume of CDs. Fortunately, it's a ONE-TIME task. Once they are ripped, you have that quality of music file for up to forever (assuming you have a good backup program in place, with at least one backup stored offsite).
If you have many CDs, it is very much like assembly line work that can take hours or days (maybe weeks???) to complete. Getting a little more speed out of the rips themselves may impact the hassle a bit... but the bulk of the pace is driven by how quickly you remove a finished disc and insert a new one to be ripped... AND clean up any errors in song names, album/artist names, album art, etc. In my experience, getting all of the metadata correct and in good form is the bulk of the time demand... and only human interaction seems to be able to do that very well.
This is a classic multi-tasking task to do a bunch each day while working on other things. Else, consider hiring a student or senior to do it for you: "No, this is not lawn mowing or baby sitting; I need my CD collection ripped." Or, I would guess there are "drop off the CDs and we'll rip them for you" services you could use.
The speed of the rip matters, but it will tend to vary based on quality of the disc being ripped and many other factors. If me, I wouldn't really give that too much focus in trying to get my own large collection ripped. There likely is a little time savings if you can line up fastest drives but I think the human processing and disk swaps is where the bulk of time is burned- not the spin speed itself.
Another option is to treat it like a gym workout or similar, where you don't aim to go from weakling to The Hulk in one day but work at it a little every day over a good period of time until all of them are converted. For example, how many could you rip and clean up in 1 hour? That number divided into the total number could give you a number of days to complete the task without having to spend upwards of all hours every day for upwards of days or weeks to get a whole collection imported: "If I start today, I'll have the whole collection imported by Month, Day" by allocating only 1 hour per day.
Still another option is to ask around among friends to see who has an external CD/DVD reader they might loan to you. Hook them up to a few Macs or PCs and import 2, 3, 4, 5 discs at a time. Then merge all of the imported rips into a single drive.
Tip: With hard drives being cheap, a good option is to rip them all as Apple lossless to a big external drive. Then you can import them into Music/iTunes and- if smaller files are desired- select a preferred compression option and compress them all to it. After that is complete, delete the lossless copies out of Music/iTunes but (suggestion) KEEP them on that external drive so that if you later want to alter your compression setting to something else (usually LESS compression for higher quality) or format (mp3, AAC, something not even invented yet?), you don't have to re-rip all of the CDs again.
