I had been having a heck of a time researching BD drives, and whether or not they were rip locked. After getting a few hints from the MakeMKV forum, I bought the WH16NS40 from LG.
Thankfully, this drive blows away my previous drive right out of the box with no MediaCodeSpeedEdit use or anything. I saturated USB 2.0 on the first rip at 11x. I'll update this thread when I get my USB 3.0 enclosure.
Here's a screenshot from when I backed up my copy of Red Dawn:
