Customer Reviews

Lacie d2 External 16x Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW Drive with FireWire/USB2.0 (Model 300920)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

One of the finest electronic device made and a must have for laptop owners. Not very portable, but is a faster option then an internal DVD-r for a laptop. LaCie is really giving you a lot for this quality DVD-burner. I have burn over 30 DVDs since August 2004 for backing up files, making home movies and there haven't been any problems yet.

The software that comes with this burner is for Mac and PC. I use the PC's software, which include Roxio's Easy Media 7.0; that can burn movie, CD and DVD, and do some simple editing. Converting a file to a video on a slow laptop is kind of long though. There is a DVD player software included also, but there are a dime a dozen out there. I burned at 16X, 8X, 4X speed on DVD-R and DVD+R on Sony, Verbatim, Memorex, Fuji, TDK media and they all work fine. This drive is one of the faster external DVD-r options available. I have yet to use the expensive Double Layer DVD media option.

The drive has a nice metallic silver exterior that is very robust and sturdy, with a blue ON/OFF button, connection to a firewire or USB2 output. I have a Dell 8200 PIV laptop with 1gigs of ram, with an 80gigs external firewire hard-drive that connect straight to the external D2 burner. It is somewhat smooth and quiet NEC's drive. Hopefully it will last a long time.

LaCie is a French company that is trying to break into the America's market with a balance of great quality components at a reasonable price.

I purchased this to work with my iBook G4, which does not have a SuperDrive. I wanted to make DVDs with iDVD and this worked fine. I did need to find a patch online to get iDVD to recognize the drive, but other than that, once it stated working, it gave me the results that I wanted. It also was quick when backing up my data files.

Comes with Toast Lite - which can also be used to burn DVD movies. It isn't "light" weight or noisy which is nice. And once you unplug the USB cable, it shuts itself off.

NOTE: IF YOU ARE BUYING THIS TO USE IDVD, YOU NEED IDVD VERSION 5 (which comes with iLife 05), Older versions of this program will not recognize or burn to this drive.

When you get it working, the drive is fine. It does what it is supposed to do. However, the way to get it working is not so smooth. It comes with 2 CDs and a lot of software and the installation process is confusing, but doable. The case is really heavy. Probably it's supposed to attract big truck/SUV buyers or something. It's actually not a bad thing, just unusual. So if you are not afraid of technology, the drive is ok. But if you need something really hassle free, maybe you should try some other one.

I have been very happy with this drive so far. I am a Mac user, and the installation experience was incredibly easy. I already had Toast Titanium installed, so all I had to do was plug the drive in and pop in a blank DVD. It literally took fewer than five minutes to unpack the drive and start burning my first disc. So far I've only burned to DVD+R and the burning has been fast and foolproof (no coasters yet!).

I can't speak to how this would work with Windows, but for Mac users, I highly recommend this drive.

I've bought this drive from Amazon in January 2005. It's hooked up to a laptop in my house that functions as a file server, so the only purpose of that laptop is to accept the files and give me the capability to burn them to the DVD.

The drive is a gamble to say the least. It seemed to work well with Sony DVD-R blanks, very few corruptions or errors during the process, but then after I tried Sony DVD+R and bought a whole bundle of Office Depot DVD+R blanks, things got worse.

The Roxio software would complain about "Not a valid recordable media" in the drive, even though it was a virgin clean blank from the pack, the exact same pack that just had a workable disk yesterday. Sometimes I would get the "Unspecified error 0x01" roughly 3 hours during the burn process, which is extremely annoying (forgot to mention I hooked it to USB 1.1 port, so it doesn't function at 16x, but that's my fault). Other times it would be another "Transcoding error" and "Unspecified error" with trashed blanks.

I'd say I get about 30-35 successful burns with this drive on a 50-disk DVD+R pack. The rest of the blanks have to go in the garbage. Lately I've installed Nero over Roxio software with its "useful" error messages and things seem to run smoother. This would be an okay performance from a no-name cheap Chinese drive purchased in a bin at Fry's, for brand-name Lacie drive the quality of both software and the hardware is quite low.

This Lacie DVD burner has worked very well with my Macs (iBooks G3 and G4 and iMac G5) through the FireWire port. It burns a DVD in something like 8 minutes, either data DVD or video DVD, though I haven't tried with home made DVDs or iDVD, I have just tried copying video DVDs (movies) and it works great.

I have burned data DVDs on a Pentium 4 PC WinXP through USB2 port and it works just fine, though not as fast as with FireWire. I have even used it to burn data DVDs through USB 1.1 port on my iBook G3 and it worked, though it took much longer, for obvious reasons. I haven't tried burning Dual-Layer yet.

I really recommend this product, I really like that it has both FireWire and USB ports. I also like that it powers on/off when you connect/disconnect it to the computer.

My only complain is that the tray button is a bit difficult to reach when the tray is open.

I've always had good luck with LaCie products, so purchasing the d2 dual burner seemed like a no-brainer. Boy, was I ever wrong.

I've used this burner on Macintoshes and on Windows machines. I've used it with various versions of Toast and various other DVD-burning utilities, and tried various brands of DVDs. In all instances, it consistently fails to burn dual-layer DVDs without incuring fatal write errors. When burning standard DVDs, the failure rate is about 25 percent.

Returning the DVD burner to LaCie for warranty repairs did no good. It still does not work, so I'm sending it back a second time.

Maybe I bought a lemon. Perhaps other people have had better luck with this particular DVD burner, but I can tell you one thing, my previous love affair with LaCie products is over. I will never again buy another one of their products.

I bought this drive to use on both PC and Mac, and paid extra for double layer and lightscribe capabilities. After fiddling with it for 2 days, I am returning it. It is as slow as my old DVD writer (internal) at copying movies from my hard drive (appears to be 1x). The tech support is lousy (not toll-free, and busy all the time), the enclosed software difficult to use, and all in all I am extremely disappointed. I am a computer trainer by profession, so I figure if I can't use it, a lot of other people won't be able to either. Don't bother unless you want to beat your head against a wall all night trying to get it to work.

LaCie normally builds very reliable, high-quality products... I've never had one of their hard drives die on me (I just end up retiring them... anyone need a 700MB external scsi drive? By the way, they generally don't build the internal drive mechanisms, but use reliable brands like Quantum--- which I believe they bought-out.) However, this burner has been problematic since day one. It sporadically fails to burn discs at about a 30 to 40% failure rate, despite different name-brand (TDK, Verbatim, etc.) blank DVDs. Today, the drive stopped recognizing ANY media, stating "no disc" was present. I wish I had purchased a different drive. I've sent an email to LaCie and await their reply.

Worked great at first, just as it went out of warranty it failed and with little use - LaCie support were complete "cut and paste" stooges, strung me along through 5-6 emails - they couldn't ID the drive, even with a pic of the back label! Then "er, sorry, it's out of warranty" - well dugh! - Freakin' Sad, I used to respect LaCie - but will never buy a drive of theirs again.