Lacie, a hardware company which focuses on external hard drives, arrays and monitors, announced Monday an 8x Blu-ray Disc burner. The d2 Blu-ray supports both USB 2.0 and Firewire 400, and can burn up to 50GB on a single dual-layer BD-R disc.
The 8x recording speed can be accomplished using Firewire — the USB will only burn at 6x. Disc types supported beyond BD-R and BD-RE include DVD+-R, DVD+-RW, DVD+-R DL, CD-R and CD-RW.
The drive makes use of Easy Media Creator 10 and MToast 9 Titanium software to burn the discs. Discs will hold an estimated four hours of HD video, at 720p using MPEG-2 compression at a bit rate of 24Mbits.
Lacie previously released 2x and 4x BD-R drives at a much higher MSRP. This new external drive will retail for $449.00.
