Lacie d2 Blu-ray external Blu-ray writer

Lacie’s products are known as much for their minimal, contemporary design as for their excellent build quality.

With expensive-looking metallic housings and sporting designer names ­ – in this case it’s Neil Poulton – ­ they’re the must-have accessories of all self-respecting media creatives.

In order to work well with both PC and Macintosh systems, the d2 Blu-ray supports USB2 and Firewire 400 interfaces, offering a pair of the latter to enable daisy-chaining of additional Firewire peripherals.

The software provided is also compatible with both Windows and OSX, although there’s a different product for each operating system. Windows users get Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 XE for authoring and Cyberlink PowerDVD Blu-ray Edition for HD playback, while on the Mac you’ll get Toast 8 Titanium.

A 25GB BD-RE disc is provided, along with a full set of cables and a compact external power supply unit on a conveniently long cable.

Inside the frontless silver chassis, a standard PC Blu-ray drive is clearly visible, festooned with the usual row of icons denoting compatibility with a wide range of disc media. The drive itself is a Matshita (Panasonic) BD-MLT SW-5583 model capable of burning BD-R (write-once) media at up to four-speed and BD-RE (rewriteable) discs at up to two-speed. DVD writing operates faster at 16-speed and eight-speed for single and dual-layer media respectively.

While these speeds may have been, until recently, rather impressive, new products offer six-speed and even eight-speed performance with write-once media. Furthermore, Buffalo’s eight-speed external Blu-ray writer is £150 less than the Lacie d2. However, Lacie’s design and build quality is considerably greater. Sometimes that matters a lot ­ but not very often and we would suggest users consider the alternatives before splashing out on such an expensive product.