Question: what's silver, slightly bigger than a hardback novel, connects to your Mac's FireWire port and will put the same size dent in your wallet as a MacBook? Answer: LaCie's latest optical disc writer, thed2 Blu-ray drive, which reads and writes Blu-ray, DVD and CD media.
If you've been following the next-generation optical disc format wars closely, you'll recall that Blu-ray - developed by Sony and Panasonic - is the best thing to happen to optical media since Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms came out on CD, and is set to replace DVD as the de facto standard for archiving data and distributing high-definition media. Then again, it could be the biggest technological white elephant since Betamax, or Atrac. And that, rather than any deficiency in the product itself, is the key obstacle facing this d2 Blu-ray drive.
Blu-ray, in theory, is a better format. In pure capacity terms, Blu-ray discs can hold up to 25GB on a single layer, or 50GB on double-layer discs. That compares very favourably with its competitor HD-DVD, which has maximum capacities of 15GB and 30GB respectively. Blu-ray's copy protection is, in theory, more robust than HD-DVD's, although both have already been compromised. As a result, most Hollywood studios favour Blu-ray over HD-DVD for movie distribution. Against that, Blu-ray manufacturing requires bigger changes to fabrication setups, which means media and drives are more expensive. As far as Apple is concerned, it has yet to choose one format over the other.
All of which leaves this Blu-ray drive in a bit of limbo. It's a perfectly good example ofthe technology and, with the help of the bundled Toast 7.1 Titanium, allows you to burn up to 50GB of data on a double-layer disc. It connects to your Mac using FireWire 400 or USB 2 and, despite being relatively big for an optical drive, has an external power supply.
We experienced one problem in our tests: the bundled version of Toast wouldn't launch on our iMac G5 after copying it across from the CD. Trashing preferences and other files associated with a previous version of Toast failed to do the trick. Downloading version 7.1.2 from Roxio's website had us up and running, though, and it was perfectly happy with the serial number supplied with the copy in the LaCie box.
Burning a Blu-ray disc is like burning any other disc - simply select your format and drag files and folders onto the main window. We managed to get about 45GB onto one double-layer disc before Toast reported it would have to span the data across multiple discs. Burning 45GB took about 90 minutes, excluding verification.
It's worth remembering that Blu-ray discs can only be read on a Blu-ray drive, so if you need to share data, you'll need to make sure the recipient has a Blu-ray drive. For the moment, you can only copy data to Blu-ray from your Mac. DVD Studio Pro, for example, doesn't support Blu-ray for high-definition content burning. And you can't use this drive to play back Blu-ray movies on your Mac or TV, either, as the Mac doesn't support Blu-ray movies and the drive doesn't have either the DVI or HDMI connectors required to hook it up to a TV.
The LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive is an excellent example of the technology and a great way of dumping high volumes of data to optical disc, but its high price, limited use, and uncertain future mean you should think very carefully before investing.
Author: Kenny Hemphill
MacUser Online