LG Electronics 14X SATA Blu-ray Internal Rewriter without Software, Black Model WH14NS40 - OEM

Pros: Love the eject button as it isn’t a single small button like most disc drives, it is the entire bottom right section on the front panel of the drive. This makes it a breeze to find and press when not looking.
The notification LED is a very subtle blue color that is helpful but not obnoxiously bright.
Firmware update process was quick, easy and worked without issue.
Supports the next Blu Ray disc standard which is BDXL.

Supports M-Disc which is pretty cool but currently not that useful as its limited to DVD’s only which do not hold much. According to their website though, they will be shipping Blu Ray M-Disc’s as of March of this year which should prove a lot more useful.

It took 29 minutes and 46 seconds to burn a 25 GB disc which equates to 22.5 GB’s worth of material.
Below are some benchmarks:

Blu Ray (Disc Rated Speed = 6X)
• Average: Read = 9.05X (39.73 MB/s) Write = 3.02X (13.26 MB/s)
• Start: Read = 5.13X (22.52 MB/s) Write = 2.12X (9.307 MB/s)
• End: Read = 12.02X (52.77 MB/s) Write = 3.11X (13.65 MB/s)
• Access Time: 150 ms
• Burst Rate: 65.0 MB/s

DVD (Disc Rated Speed = 16X)
• Average: Read = 11.39X (15.38 MB/s) Write = 11.41X (15.40 MB/s)
• Start: Read = 6.63X (8.950 MB/s) Write = 6.70X (9.045 MB/s)
• End: Read = 16.08X (21.71 MB/s) Write = 16.15X (21.80 MB/s)
• Access Time: 124 ms
• Burst Rate: 48.2 MB/s

CD (Disc Rated Speed = 52X)
• Average: Read = 34.96X (5.24 MB/s) Write = 33.60X (5.04 MB/s)
• Start: Read = 21.26X (3.19 MB/s) Write = 1.51X (0.23 MB/s)
• End: Read = 48.85X (7.33 MB/s) Write = 50.01X (7.50 MB/s)
• Access Time: 140 ms
• Burst Rate: 29.7 MB/s

Cons: The LG logo has a shiny finish and can be annoying as it is reflective. A matte finish would be better.

Overall Review: To sum things up this is a great disc drive but I am still disappointed by the poor writing performance of Blu Ray discs. I was hoping by waiting that by now they would be adequate but unfortunately they are still quite awful. This is no fault of the drive as it supports a good writing speed of 14X which translates to roughly 61.46 MB/s which is great but sadly the discs are not ready for this yet. Thankfully though by buying this it is a somewhat future proof investment as I don’t see discs outpacing the writing speed of this drive any time soon.

To put this in perspective it took about 30 minutes to fill up a 25 GB single layer disc at the presented speed of roughly 3X (Despite the disc being rated for 6X). If this were a dual layer 50 GB disc the time to completion is now 1 hour and if it’s a BDXL 100 GB disc now its completion time is 2 hours. That is awfully slow but if it were to run at the rated maximum speed of 14X as the drive supports the time would be much faster and more ideal.

So after doing some simple math, if I had a disc that ran at the actual 14X limit of the drive it would take roughly 6.43 minutes to complete a 25 GB disc and a more respectable 12.86 minutes to complete a 50 GB disc and finally 25.71 minutes to finish a 100 GB quad layer disc. This kind of performance I approve of. And look forward to and thanks to this drive I am prepared.

Disc Speed Rates:
CD 1X= 0.15 MB/s
DVD 1X= 1.35 MB/s
Blu Ray 1X= 4.39 MB/s

*All tests were conducted three times to ensure accuracy and repeatability of results.

Pros: Fast, nominal features, BD-R etc. is all pretty standard at this point. The one that works works well so far (knock on wood)

With optical drives, the standard should be that every drive works to spec. I don't expect to be impressed, there's no room for me to be amazed at how awesome a DVD / BR drive is. If it works, and it works consistently, that's a five-star drive. But when you can't even do that right...

Cons: One (out of two) was DOA. Not dead exactly, the tray opens and disks will spin up, but no reads. Boot with a disk in, it hangs indefinitely. Boot normally and then insert a disk, no read whatsoever. Registers as empty / no response / system lock-up depending on what I'm trying to do with it.

Swapped the two drives to see if SATA card is bad. Nope. Good drive still good, bad drive still bad.

Swapped them into an entirely different SATA bus. Nope. Good drive still good, bad drive still bad.

Took out all other drives except boot and these two. Nope. Good drive still good, bad drive still bad.

Put into a different system, no other drives, just MB, PS, bad BD, and monitor. Will not boot to a bootable CD. Boots to USB-based OS but bad drive is still bad.

So, this drive is really, surely, absolutely dead. Braindead. It looks like it's working, but it's 100% DOA. Does it get power? Sure, I do have a power cable plugged into it. My motherboard is aware of it (indeed, so am I). It spins disks around too. Zoom zoom. Pretty sure my vinyl turntable would do all of that too, with about the same effect. In the end, neither this drive nor my vinyl turntable can read a CD, DVD, or BD.

Everything LOOKS functional, even though it's not working, so if you get one of these babies (or two, or more), check them ALL before you conclude they all work, because if they're all powered on and you put a disk into one of them and it worked, that doesn't mean the rest work.

I think the laser itself might be dead, or at least, the drive is completely unusable, i.e. it's an overpriced retractable cupholder with blue LED.

It chirps too. That's a good sign. That's the noise I want my drives to make. (The functional drive does not chirp.)

Other quirks?

Button is ugly panel rocker (the WHOLE front panel is a rocker). It's stupid.

The drive is marginally smaller than it should be, so it wiggles in a screw-less case. Screw it in -- problem solved.

Neither of those is worth taking off any eggs, but it's worth mentioning in case somebody cares.

Overall Review: Newegg was good enough to issue me an RMA 34 days out of the original order because they messed up the shipping on the SATA card these two drives are plugged into and I didn't/couldn't test them until it was too late. I'd bump it up one egg (back up to 4) for that great customer service (even if it was making up for a bit of lousy service), except this is not really rating Newegg's service, it's rating LG's product.

So far, LG's batting 0.500, which is great for baseball but really bad for $50+ BD-R drives. If the third one is DOA... I'll be back to take this rating down an egg or two..