I agree.  WD HDDs are not very reliable.  I greatly prefer Seagate.

Easy.  500 CDs stored in AIFF.  Hard drive storage is cheap.  Also, using AIFF instead of Apple Lossless allows me to take my portable 1TB HD to work (Dell Windows 7 machine) and play music initially downloaded on my home system (Mac Mini).

Pretty much the same thing.  I don't know what the quality of the sound would be at that price, but it should function essentially the same.   However, if you're hooking a consumer CD player to a receiver, the CD player already has a DAC in it and I think an inexpensive external DAC would be...

I have the Fiio D3 with a Micca Toslink mini-jack cable being driven by a second generation Mac Mini.  The D3 is connected with standard quality RCA cables to an older Technics receiver that is capable of driving 4 ohm speakers.  The speakers I have are vintage ADS M12s.  I also use a set of...