Customer Reviews

LaCie Blue Ray + DVD+/- R/RW FireWire & USB 2.0 (301115U)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great product I just recently burned my first blu ray disc and the result was a beautiful HD picture. This would have received five stars if it would have come with the right software package. I use this product on a Mac and it comes with Titanium Toast 8. Toast 8 allows you to burn to a blu ray disc but data only blu ray discs. As a professional videographer looking to make a HD video disc this was not what I intended. After some research and an upgrade to Toast 9, plus an additional plug-in for 9, I was able to burn a HD Video disc on Blu Ray. Once the software was correct it did as advertised.

I just bought this external USB 2.0 Lacie Blu-Ray burner, and just burned my very first 25 GB data disk -> on a TDK BD-R 25 GB Blu-Ray blank. It seems to work! I used Roxio Create 8.2 XE (came with the Lacie Blu-Ray burner). Everything went very smoothly, but it did take A VERY VERY LONG TIME (as in several hours to burn 23 GB of data). The Roxio software reports "Target max burn speed 2.0x, Current burn speed: 0.97x" so basically I think it's burning the MONSTROUS 23 GB at 1x speed.

I am not interested in ever burning a movie, so I did not test that. I'm only doing permanent write-once backups of large amounts of data (like my iTunes MP3 collection).

The Roxio software came with TONS OF BLOATWARE, and as I said I'm only interested in the very most simple burning of data disks, so here are the steps I used to install the minimum:

1) Insert the Roxio install CD, run the "Setup" program.

2) Unselect **EVERYTHING** (yes, **EVERYTHING**) and continue
with the install. It still installs 3 things!

3) In Add/Remove programs, remove the "Drag to Disc" burner
functionality.

RESULT -> You are left with one piece of bloatware "Backup MyPC 7"
that I haven't figured out how to remove yet, and the one piece
of software you want "Roxio Creator 8.2 XE".

The Roxio Creator 8.2 XE is really super straight-forward and easy to use -> just drag directories onto the main window, then click the "Burn Disc" button. If you first insert a blank Blu-Ray disk, then it shows you have 25 GB to fill up (and shows a nice friendly bar showing how much you currently have selected). If instead you insert a DVD-R, it shows you have 4.7 GB to fill up, etc. Before burning it complained that some of my filenames had bad symbols in them ('#' is forbidden in the ISO filesystem it seems), and it listed the exact files for me, so I went in and fixed those up before burning. Overall a good experience.

-- BrianW, Palo Alto, CA