The present work is devoted to evaluating the effect of mesa-stripe design parameters on the output characteristics of 975 nm InGaAs/GaAs/AlGaAs laser diodes with the emitting stripe width W = 100 µm and the cavity length L = 4 mm. The output power, threshold current, central wavelength, and full spectral width at half maximum values were analyzed when comparing the two variants of mesa-stripe design to determine the optimal etching depth of  semiconductor structure. Two variants of the mesa-stripe design were obtained by plasmachemical etching to different depths of the heterostructure. According to the results of the study for the mesa-stripe design formed by etching to the p-cladding layer of the laser heterostructure, a less scatter of the controlled parameters within a group of fabricated laser diodes and effective suppression of parasitic lateral modes in the LD cavity were revealed.