OWC’s Mercury Pro external 16x Blu-ray & Optical Storage

PERFORMANCE

The speed of a quality drive should be similar from one brand to another. Recording speeds are largely limited by the media to 6X. Playback speeds should always be sufficient for stutter free movie playback, which is also dependent on the PC hardware. In the case of the Mercury Pro’s LG drive, it will mostly be limited by its fastest interface, USB 3.0. Loading time, how long it takes to load a movie or programs after the disk is accessed, is important. Read and write speeds are important; the Blu-ray burner needs to be able to read accurately at a fast speed and it also needs to write at at least 6X for write once disks.

Literally hundreds of separate benchmarks have been developed for optical drives, but there are several really important ones that are easily accessible.

SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS

It is not easy to easily tell differences between quality Blu-ray drives.  Synthetic optical drive benchmarks are easy to find, but many are outdated and others are quite expensive. We used both Nero Disk Speed and Opti Drive to benchmark both of our drives as well as using Passmark to score them.

Opti Drive

Opti Drive is a relatively recently updated shareware program than can give every detail of an optical drive.

Here is the ASUS compared with the LG Mercury Pro using Opti Drive. Spinup time on the ASUS is 2.98 seconds while the Mercury Pro is seven hundredths of a second slower. Spindown is within .01 second at 3.55 seconds. Recognition time is instantaneous for the Pro and only .07 second with the ASUS.

There are many tests that Opti Drive can run, here is just one screen showing the fast transfer rate screen of the Mercury Pro/LG drive using DIGISTOR’s 50GB 6X disk:

The drives are very close in performance which is impressive considering that the LG drive is an external drive over the USB 3.0 interface. The Mercury Pro drive’s average Read speed is slightly faster at 2.99X, while Start and End are identical. Access times for the ASUS are: Random 219 ms, 1/3 stroke 257 ms, and Full stroke is 724 ms. Burst rate is 27.8 MB/sec and CPU usage is also 0 %.

Nero Disk Speed

Nero Disk Speed, formerly known as Nero CD/DVD Speed, is freeware and is found on under “Free Tools”. It is benchmarking software designed to test any CD-ROM, DVD, or Blu-ray drive. Besides testing the basics such as CPU usage read speed and transfer rate, more advanced tests can be performed including testing: access times, burst rate, DAE quality, spinup and spindown time, load and eject times.

It is very simple to use, it displays the results in real time as they are being tested, and the information it provides is very reliable.  This information was obtained using the Mercury Pro and the 4x media supplied by OWC with the drive.

Nero Disk Speed can also be used to test the media.

The first image shows the results of testing a 25 4X Philips Blu-ray disk as supplied by OWC with the burner.Here is the same test using 6X 25GB media as supplied by DIGISTOR:

We can also use DIGISTOR’s identical 6X 50GB to test any differences between the Mercury Pro and the ASUS 12X burner.

We create a disk using the 6X 50GB media using the Mercury Pro and then test it:Next we create a disk using the 6X 50GB media using the ASUS drive and then test it:

Everything about the OWC Mercury Pro 16X LG drive is quality, and it outperforms the ASUS drive in many cases, besides being able to read 128GB disks and write 50GB disks at a higher speed than the 12X drive internal drive.

PassMark

Passmark scores everything in a PC, including testing the optical drive. ASUS doesn’t achieve a very high CD Mark at 137.4, while CD Read scores 1.12.

Here is the overall score with the ASUS internal drive including the disk score:

The Mercury Pro achieves a higher CD Mark at 282.5 versus 137.4 with the ASUS, while CD Read scores 1.49 versus 1.12 with the ASUS drive .

Here is the overall score with the OWC Mercury Pro External drive – 3549.9 versus 3545.5 for the ASUS. Disk Mark for the Mercury Pro is 1150.3 versus 1151.7 for the ASUS.

Generally, the Mercury Pro is scored higher by PassMark. Let’s look at one practical benchmarks, copying.

Copy and Recording Speeds

Here is the Mercury Pro copying 17.1GB of raw video that was taken at Nvidia’s GTX 2014 to a 6X 25GB Blu-ray disk for permanent archival.  And this is just part of Day one of the event!

There is no difference in the copy times between the internal and the external drives. Both drives took about 28 minutes and 40 seconds to copy 17.1GB of data.

Let’s check out Blu-ray software.