I have a lot of experience in this and honestly, most CD modern drives work just fine. This isn't 2005 and most of the modern drives are quite capable. Longevity is what you're really paying for with better drives like Panasonic but really, I've never broken a drive by ripping. Dropping something on an open tray? Yes. Ripping? No. Panasonic and Lite-on make really good drives and are good choices.
When I had hundreds of CDs to go I used my own "lite" version of Patrick Norton's "
Rip Monster 3000" masterpiece of a ripper and installed 4 CD drives in a fast multicore CPU tower PC and used
dbPowerAmp "Reference" in batch mode to rip four at a time to flacs. I then used the included Music Converter in batch mode convert my flacs to MP3s for mobile use while I slept. This system saved me at least a hundred hours of work. The important thing is to back up often because a hard drive failure after you've ripped a couple of hundred CDs is a heartbreaker.