Lacie d2 External Blu-ray Burner

Blu-Ray finally emerged the winner of the battle of the format! HD-DVD gave up when major studies decided to go Blu-Ray. So it does make sense to buy a Blu-ray burner if you are planning to be future proof. But the only problem at the moment lies in the fact that these are damn expensive and hard to find. Lacie decided to take the lead and they are already out with an external Blu-ray burner that can be hooked to your PC or Mac.

Lacie d2 external Blu-ray burner specifications :

• Dimensions : 6.8″ x 10.6″ x 1.7″
• Type : External
• Interface : USB 2.0 , Firewire 400
• Read speed : 32x(CD) / 8x(DVD) / 2x(BD)
• Write speed : 24x(CD) / 8x(DVD±R) / 2x(BD-R)
• Buffer size : 8MB
• Software included : Cyberlink PowerDVD, Roxio Easy Media Creator
• Approx Price : $650

The Lacie d2 Blu-ray burner supports burning of all formats except HD-DVD. A simple reason to invest in this drive would be if you want to use Blu-ray discs as a backup or you are a video professional editor needing to carry around loads of data. For others it is a wait-n-watch game till the prices come down.

The hard drive although comes labeled as Lacie but the actual manufacturer of the drive mechanism is Matsushita, the company which owns Panasonic.Lacie provides the external casing,support and support. The drive also supports dual layer Blu-ray discs which are capable of holding 50GB of data!

Having an external drive adds a whole lot of convenience and you can carry around the burner with you since not many would have it and it makes your tasks easier.Also the drive supports both USB 2.0 and Firewire connections which is always a nice option.

Coming to the performance of the drive, it works pretty well both on Windows and Mac. The drive is supported by quite a few of the burning softwares and you will not have any issues burning discs. There are no issues even on Mac front but you need to use the bundled Roxio Toast software to get things working properly in all situations. The write speeds are impressive and same goes for the read speeds. The bundled software does a great job and comes in handy as you don’t need to hunt around for compatible softwares.

Pros :

• Wide format support
• Supports dual Blu-ray discs
• Both PC and Mac compatible
• Good Performance

Cons:

• Expensive
• No HD-DVD support

Final Thoughts

As I said earlier the drive is not meant for everybody due to its high price. But Lacie has done a good job with the drive and managed to bring out a stable product in the market. This will surely set a benchmark for the coming products.

My Rating : 3.75/5