LaCie USB 2.0/FW Professional BD-R/BD-RE Blu-Ray Drive 301856U

by LaCie

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 12.7 x 6.3 x 8.4 inches ; 3.1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 5.2 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B001P5C9TE
• Item model number: 301856U
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: June 17, 2003

Product Description

Engineered for professional video authoring houses, the LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive records, rewrites, and plays back high-definition (HD) video. Store up to four hours of HD video on a 50GB* disc—about 10 times as much as a DVD. Shoot HD videos from your camcorder, author the videos, and burn them without any quality loss using multiple video codecs (MPEG2, AVC, VC-1). Then, share them with customers or give them to a replication facility for distribution. Now you can store large amounts of valuable administrative documents, audio asset libraries, raw video shoots and multiple image files on a single disc with complete peace of mind. The LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive’s writing process ensures record authenticity and longevity on sturdy write-once discs with an enhanced scratch-resistant hard coating surface. It also offers a packet writing option. By choosing Blu-ray technology, you get low cost per gigabyte in safe storage. BD-ROM doesn’t mean only high-definition video. With the LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive, enjoy an HD movie with vibrant sound. Blu-ray offers up to eight channels at 192kHz/32 streams of audio quality. Get a stunning experience with multiple simultaneous videos, updatable content, full interactive challenges, and activities. This state-of-the-art drive comes bundled with easy-to-use burning software, which includes a backup application. It is a genuine timesaving solution for regularly backing up important files or emails at an impressive data transfer rate. In addition, LaCie’s exclusive, trusted d2 drive design is unsurpassed for durability and offers near-silent operation. Package contents: LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive, FireWire cable, Hi-Speed USB 2.0 cable, external power supply, LaCie DVD-ROM (Windows)/CD-ROM (Mac) with User Manual and software, Quick Install Guide.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Of course you need one of these.", December 4, 2009

By 

Trurl "trurlthe_constructor" (Earth) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: LaCie USB 2.0/FW Professional BD-R/BD-RE Blu-Ray Drive 301856U (Personal Computers)

The first question that you will ask yourself before your purchase this is "Do I really need Blu-ray?" "Wouldn't it be cheaper to by hard drives?"

Well, the Blu-ray burner has several key advantages. It also is very costly; plus the price of discs. But each time you use it, it becomes cheaper per giga-bit. The 25 gig discs are the most affordable. The 50 gig dual layer discs aren't worth the money unless you are doing high definition video. But back to the advantage; the key advantage is distribution. If you are mailing someone files you are not going to send a hard drive is one example. Another is placing files in different places throughout the house. You know, the basic advantages as your cd-burner, but with 25 gig capacity. You could argue that a dvd will suffice, but when it takes 5 or 6 discs to equal a blu-ray; the blu-ray has the advantage when it comes to organizing 5 times less the number of discs.

I like the fact this burner is portable, so that I can use it on many computers. I burnt about 25 gig in an hour with file verification. So this thing is pretty fast.

The only thing I don't understand is that blu-ray movie playback is not compatible with the Mac. On the Mac it only does burning. I have used this burner for file backup on both Mac and PC. The PC does have movie playback and it works fine.

I would definitely recommend this burner. There is still a need for physical media in an age of downloadable files and broadband. It reminds me of 1998 when a cd-burner sold at this price.

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y(x) = (3x^2) + (1/x) - 23
y(x) = (3.032x^2) + 0.757

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Blu-ray player by LaCie, September 28, 2009

By 

philparty "philparty" (Northridge, Ca) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: LaCie USB 2.0/FW Professional BD-R/BD-RE Blu-Ray Drive 301856U (Personal Computers)

Excellent player with Power DVD Ultra added. The software included is outdated and needs to be upgraded which is an additional cost to the buyer

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Seems to be good unir, January 12, 2010

By 

John Woods (Potsdam, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: LaCie USB 2.0/FW Professional BD-R/BD-RE Blu-Ray Drive 301856U (Personal Computers)

I received the unit after having a long frustrating experience with another internal blu-ray writer. The Lacie is a lot more money than I wanted to spend, but I bit the bullet.

When I first plugged it in, it was not by Windows 7. I was about ready to scream because of the last experience with the internal. Tried it in an xp machine, and it worked. I then assumed that Windows 7 did not supprt the unit. I was furious. Tried it one more time in the Windows 7 machine and it worked. Maybe loose cable, who knows.

Once I got it installed and started looking at the specifics, it turns out the unit is actually a Pioneer BDR 205 burner in a Lacie case. One could probably buy the Pioneer internal drive and install in an external case cheaper than the cost of this unit. The pioneer is a highly rated burner.