good and bad
this is a very good burner in terms of ease of use, functionality, but unfortunately, it comes w/out-dated software (toast titanium 9) for blu-ray DVD burning. I wound up having to purchase a Titanium 10 pro to fulfill my desire for a real professional blu-ray burner for my HD DVDs. and lastly, a firewire is always faster, and therefore, more preferable than a usb 2.0 -- la ice got to move faster on that as well.

Compact and cute-looking LaCie Blu-Ray Drive 301856U
Blu-ray burner is a relatively new technology and I wanted to give this a shot. I needed a Blu-ray because I had loads of files and all are strewn across different computers and happy to note it works fine on all OS. I mean it burns well and the movie playback is pretty smooth.

I felt that LaCie would be useful to have them organized and my judgment dint go wrong.

So compact & cute-looking, just cant ignore this fab design but could have been more wallet-friendly!

Great Blu-ray burner
Works great. No coasters yet.
Now, if only the price of blank Blu-ray discs would go down.

Seems to be good unir
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.

"Of course you need one of these."
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