Does the drive that I use matter in the quality of the rip. Obviously I'm not going to use a drive from 10 years ago. Does having the capability of ide or e-ide matter. And does the optical digital out have anything to do with cd ripping. I am finally archiving my cd's and only want to do this one time and I want to do it right.

The drive matters, however, if you use EAC with AccurateRip and you succed to accurately rip all tracks, you will have perfect rips - even with a bad drive, if set up properly. The difference between different drives will be the speed of ripping and the amount of occasional in-accurate rips. In the end, you will have the same results.
You mentioned, you will not use a 10 years old drive, like that would be a bad thing; note that old drives are in many cases better for DAE than some of the new ones.
IDE, E-IDE, etc. doesn't matter all that much.
Optical digital out has nothing to do with CD ripping.

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