Other World Computing Mercury Pro External Blu-ray Disc Burner Review

Quick and External

As far as external hard drives go, we’re bullish on the eSATA interface. Short of adding a Mini-SAS controller, eSATA is the highest-bandwidth port you’ll find on the outside of a mainstream computer worth your time to consider buying. This is the primary reason we jumped at the chance to review Other World Computing’s (OWC to their friends) Mercury Pro Blu-ray Disc burner. It’s a quad-interface unit, featuring USB, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and eSATA ports, and is the first non-hard drive or non-SSD device that we’ve seen that includes an eSATA port.

So, is it worth it? Let’s dig a little deeper and find out.

Day-to-Day Use

The drive is thoughtfully packaged with one of each type of interface cable used by the drive. Also included are two blank single-layer BD-R discs in jewel boxes (ours were Memorex, but yours could be made by someone else). The drive is backed by OWC’s 1-year warranty.

We experienced no trouble at all using the drive for day-to-day operation. We connected the drive to a workstation via FireWire 400 and seamlessly burned a project from Adobe Encore. We then moved the FireWire cable to a MacBook with a dying optical drive to do a reinstall of Mac OS X, where it performed not only more reliably, but also much more quickly than the Apple-supplied internal drive. A small muffin fan is built into the case as well, and it spins whenever the drive is powered on.
The underlying drive mechanism is Pioneer’s BDR-203, and the unit’s bridge chip is Oxford’s 934DSB. These are good choices for these particular components, though there are certainly numerous Blu-ray Disc burners on the market that could be integrated into this product. Oxford’s bridge chips have become a de facto standard for external optical drives, though other bridge chips certainly exist.

Speed Testing

We performed speed testing with two handy utilities: Lightning UK!’s Imgburn (free, www.imgburn.com) and Nic Wilson’s DVDINFOPro ($30, www.dvdinfopro.com). Imgburn’s Discovery function allows you to fill up a disc to test many characteristics of an optical drive. We created Discovery discs in CD-R, DVD+R and BD-R formats and then speed tested the drive with DVDINFOPro.

The scores for CD and DVD were roughly the same across all three interfaces we tested (USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and eSATA), yielding average read speeds of 23.7x for CD-R and 8.75x for DVD+R. Curiously, while Blu-ray Disc performance was close between USB 2.0 (4.15x) and FireWire 400 (4.42x), eSATA performance for BD was strikingly poor by comparison at only 3.09x. We aren’t certain as to why this is the case, particularly since the CD and DVD scores matched the scores attained through the USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 interfaces. Therefore, the data acquired through this test shows that eSATA adds no benefit for external optical drives. FireWire 400 offers a very slight advantage over USB 2.0 but the performance is reasonably close.

As a means of comparison, we also benchmarked the internal optical drives installed in the Polywell system that we reviewed a few issues back. Its Lite-On ATAPI DVD burner scored 34.83x for CD and 11.38x for DVD. Its LG SATA Blu-ray Disc burner scored 29.85x for CD, 8.67x for DVD and 3.59x for BD. With this range of scores, and never getting to a point where any of the interfaces being tested were completely saturated, we believe our testing methodology for optical drives transcends interfaces and gets right to the meat and potatoes, i.e. the drive mechanism. (Interface saturation is much more common when testing hard drives over USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 interfaces in particular, hence, why eSATA’s bandwidth makes it such a good choice for external hard drives.)

What Have We Learned?

Our eSATA evangelism reaches its end point when it comes to optical drives. We really dig this drive, but we would connect it via FireWire or USB 2.0 and save our eSATA ports for hard drives. But we had to give it a whirl.

OWC also offers a number of other Mercury Pro Blu-ray Disc burners in its arsenal, including the popular LG drive that can also read HD DVDs. If you only need to read Blu-ray Disc but still burn DVDs and CDs, you’re covered for $199. Some models are also available with Roxio Toast 10, if you’re needing a Mac burning solution.

TECH SPECS

Drive firmware version tested: 1.05

Interface: USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire

800, eSATA

Buffer size 4MB

Strengths

  • Includes cables and two blank BD-Rs
  • Easy setup

Weaknesses

  • Bizarrely slow eSATA Blu-ray Disc performance

SUMMARY

A very nice drive, but a better performance over USB or FireWire than eSATA.

Charles Fulton is Videomaker’s Technical Editor.

Other World Computing

2650 Bridge Ln.

Woodstock, IL 60098

www.macsales.com

$400