Something that's worth considering is power consumption and battery life. High speed for things like games eats a LOT of power, it's often better to go for something a little less flashy that'll run three or four hours between charges.
If this is going to be anywhere near the router on a routine basis, you might want to think about wired networking rather than WiFi. There tend to be problems with very large files and wireless access, and DVD rips are by definition very large files. Most modern notebooks will have both anyway.
Someone suggested using an external hard disk - a USB 2 one is probably OK, but network hard disks are generally formatted in a way that limits the maximum file size to well below the size of a DVD rip.
Hope this helps!
