It actually worked. I've had about 12 cd's sitting on the shelf for about 5 years that were "unrippable", but the usb drive did it no problem. Makes me wonder why I didn't get one before now...
I looked at the stats in the link above and my drive is the following;
Drive: ASUS - SDRW-08U7M-U (93 users): Submissions: 1303 accurate, 26 inaccurate, 98.0436 % accuracy
Seems pretty decent I suppose, I know nothing about drive accuracy etc. I just wanted better sound than onboard Realtek ALC283 (there's seemingly no information online about that codec, it's like it doesn't exist).
So my audio solution is
Acer Laptop (6 years old now and dirt cheap to start with)
FiiO K3 (Didn't exactly get a glowing review on here but it is what it is)
Audio Technica ATH-M40x (decent for the price I reckon)
Foobar2000 (CD collection ripped to FLAC level 0, don't know if that makes a difference but it's the maximum kbps so yeah...)
So I'm hardly living the audiophile dream, but it's a start!