LaCie doubles speed of d2 Blu-ray drive to 4x

LaCie on Tuesday unveiled a new Blu-ray disc burner, capable of writing to single-layer media at 4x speeds across Firewire or USB 2.0. The drive retains LaCie's durable d2 aluminum casing and boasts whisper quiet operation while burning 25GB and 50GB BD-R and BD-RE media, in addition to all common CD and DVD formats. LaCie is offering the dual-interface Blu-ray burner for $650, available from LaCie directly and authorized retailers.

The d2 Blu-ray drive comes with Toast Titanium for Mac, and Easy Media Creator for Windows computers, both applications from Roxio.

"In early 2007, LaCie was the first vendor to ship worldwide an external solution for professional Hi-Def video recording for both Mac and Windows," said Patrick Salin, LaCie Business Development Manager. "Since that time, Blu-ray technology has proven to be the dominant source for video recording and playback. Burning up to 50GB of data can take a reasonable amount of time, so doubling burn speeds not only increases work performance, but provides a cost-effective, long-term archival process for storing data to sturdy scratch-resistant media."