Dual-layer DVD burners are popular items these days, with prices for the hardware falling while their writing speed skyrockets. Seems like we’ve been on a DVD binge here at the Midwest Test Facility, so why not review a another one, this time from LaCie ? It’s an external FireWire model for Macs or PCs, the LaCie d2 DVD ±RW 16x ($174 street), which proved itself to be unusually fast in our testing. Let’s take a look at this attractively-designed drive and compare it to the others we’ve tested recently.

Mac users will like this LaCie d2 drive for many reasons, one of which is its beautiful stainless steel look, designed to match the Mac G5. Its appearance is undoubtedly influenced by the design of other LaCie drives, which are endowed with their good looks by none other than the Porsche Design team, certainly a group who should know about objects that look like they’re going fast even when they’re stationary. Good design must be contagious, because before I looked it up to make sure, I was certain that this was one of the products designed by Porsche, but it’s not. One appealing thing about the drive is its blue light that glows when it’s receiving power, an interesting design cue that received appreciative nods from those design-conscious mavens we have floating around here. The d2 is also available in a special package for Mac users, which includes the Toast 6 Titanium software that lets you put video and data on a DVD . For our testing, in order to be able to compare this drive with all the other drives we’ve tested, we used it with the same dual Xeon 3.4 PC we’ve used to test the others, along with the Nero 6 Ultra Edition software for burning video and data to a DVD .

A FireWire drive, the d2’s installation is a simple matter of plugging its 6-pin FireWire cable into a computer or other FireWire device, and then hooking up its AC power cable. Once you have the unit plugged in, the PC or Mac effortlessly recognizes the drive, and it’s ready to go. I like the idea of a FireWire DVD drive, where it’s easy to move it from machine to machine or take it with you if necessary. And, there’s no speed penalty when testing this baby, either. I did have one minor disappointment, however. Since 6-pin FireWire is capable of bringing power to the peripheral as well as its data signal, I wish the d2’s FireWire could do this, eliminating the need for a power cable, its attendant wall wart and the extra messy cables that go along with it.

I liked the versatility of this drive. Actually an NEC model ND3500AG drive inside LaCie ’s elegant housing, the unit is capable of reading and writing all the formats we’re starting to expect from drives like this, the list of usual suspects including DVD plus and minus, R and RW, along with all the CD writable formats. Even though having all these formats on one drive has become commonplace, I still have to mention how great it is to be such a polyglot when it comes to the ever-expanding array of writable formats.

But then there’s one more new feature that really puts the d2 in the avant garde league of DVD burners , and that’s its Dual Layer (DL) technology. This allows you to write 8.5GB of data or video onto a single side of a DVD . But one downside of this new trick is that the blank disks are inordinately expensive. Not to worry, though, because as I’ve mentioned in another dual-layer DVD review, industry experts tell Digital Media Net that the cost of these rarified disks is headed way south, to the neighborhood of around $3 by the middle of next year (2005). Even though the blanks are expensive, it’s convenient to be able to write that much data on one disk. As a quick aside, this capability gives those pesky movie pirates a new trick – they can write a whole commercially-produced DVD containing a copywritten feature film onto one disk now without having to further compress the data. Shame, shame – how dare they think they have the right to backup sacred Hollywood films! But that aside aside, a slight downside to the DL technology, as we’ll see backed up with test data later in this review, is they can’t be written as quickly as the new single-layer 16x DVD -Rs, which with this particular drive raced through our tests faster than we’ve ever seen.

Sure, this is a beautiful, minimalist design endowed upon this LaCie -designed enclosure, and we’re all enamored of its appearance, but what about the most important factor of all, its performance? It’s the speed king, that’s what. We took our 2-hour DVD movie out for the first test spin, and we wondered if some mistake had been made when we saw the results. The 4.08GB file, written to a 16x DVD , took a scant 6:35 to complete its writing. Wow. That’s a lot faster than the 9:58 it took one of its competitor DL drives, the Sony DRU-710A. It was even faster than our previous speed champ, the Philips model DVD 8601, which required 9:11. Next was our data test, where we tested the speed of the dual layer technology as it burned a typical load of data onto a disk with an 8.5GB capacity. The test bolus consisted of 8.01GB of data made up of 1739 files inside 8 folders, the same we used in our previous testing. The difference here is that this drive can burn DL disks at 4x, compared to the 2.4x of our previous test subject, the Sony DRU-710A. Of course the DL writing isn’t as fast as its 16x counterparts, but this speed merchant d2 still came out way ahead of the slower Sony drive. Using the same ABS dual Xeon 3.4GHz workstation with the exact same disks and data, it shaved off more than 15 minutes from our record write speed, burning the 8.01GB in 26:53 compared to the previous fastest time of 43:09 turned in by the Sony DL drive. That’s a remarkable speed advantage.

Summing up, this is one fast and convenient drive. It also looks gorgeous, a worthy companion to the minimalist G5 or any PC. Its 4x DL writing is the fastest we’ve seen thus far, and its price, while not the best bargain in DVD burners , is still within the range of mere mortals while delivering performance worthy of the gods. Highly recommended.

Posted by abow in Discount DVD R Media