Customer Reviews

LaCie USB 2.0 Portable 8x DVD RW Drive with Lightscribe 301485

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I purchased one of these LaCie 301485 drives on 6/2/10, in order to utilize the LightScribe printing feature. It never would complete labeling a disc, constantly giving me a "communications error". Being the good customer (and really wanting the LightScribe feature to work) I had already registered the product with LaCie, and so contacted their customer service about a fix or a replacement.

LaCie customer service is broken, at best. All my correspondence was by e-mail, since I refused to pay their $15 per phone call (probably to some out-sourced call center anyway), and it took another 2 weeks of e-mails (usually 1 or 2 days between responses) where they repeated the troubleshooting tips from their website, before they agreed to fix the unit under warranty (which they then shorted by 6 months by entering my purchase date as 12/15/09!).

I returned the unit to LaCie on 6/24/10. I received a new replacement unit on 7/8/10. The first disc I labeled worked fine, albeit a bit light. The second disc gave me the familiar "communications error". Same routine as before, 3 different computers (2 iMacs, 1 Windows netbook), re-installing the host and labeling software, re-starting machines when prompted, etc., all to no avail. All I get is the same "communications error" the previous unit gave me. I now own a $70 paperweight. (Sure they both burn data fine, but my computer burners already work - I wanted the labeling.)

I refuse to keep paying to ship back a defective unit and waiting 1 or 2 days between answers from LaCie's customer service. These units are junk, too bad since the LightScribe seemed so promising. I am going to get an inkjet that prints on CD's, and never buying anything from LaCie again. I would NOT recommend this unit to anyone.

This drive works well to write dvd and cd, but performs miserably in writing labels in Lightscribe. Sometimes, after six or eight tries, it will write a partial, very simple, graphic label on the label side of the disk.