Anyone tried the Lacie DVD Writer (Firewire version)

[EricB]

A friend of mine has this burner but has not taken it out of the box. I'm tempted to recommend he return it and buy a Pioneer A03.

Anyone have experience with this unit? Does anyone know if Ulead DVD Movie Factory will output to a firewire recorder?

[nemethmik]

The LaCie DVD-R internally has a Panasonic LF-D311 DVD-RAM/R drive,
the DVD-RW has a Pioneer drive.
Both of them are great DVD burner unit.
Having a DVD burner in an external FireWire case
is a plus.

[EricB]

Thanks for replying. Have you actually tried either unit? My concern is that the mechanism may be great, but that applications would lack drivers for the firewire version. Any experience?

[nemethmik]

I did not try these units, but I'm using a lot of gizmos connected to my computer via FireWire.
When you connect a FW storage unit to your computer it is automatically detected by the operating system, and in the case of Windows you will see a new drive letter. For the applications it is totally transparent if the DVD-unit is connected via FireWire, USB, PCMCIA, PCI, SCSI or IDE.
However, a couple of days ago I placed a Panasonic DVD burner into an external ADS Pyro FireWire case and my Windowes XP did not recognize the drive at all.
Despite these, I'd give try to LaCie. I'm sure the folks at LaCie tested the unit with Windows and Mac OS X. When the operating system detects the FireWire unit you're there.