DOA
Written: Mar 19 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, good price, availability, comes with 3 blank discs
Cons: Compatibility problems, sharp corners; DOA
The Bottom Line: It's a risky proposition-- the drive looks to be a solid piece of work, and it's supposedly supported by iTunes, but my unit was DOA.
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| btman's Full Review: La Cie Firewire/iLink CD-RW |
I picked up a LaCie 16x10x40 FireWire drive because it was on "The List" of CD-RW devices supported by iTunes. Many people also seemed to consider it a very competent drive, with good reliability and speed. Also it was the only drive (aside from the Que! Fire) that anybody in Silicon Valley seemed to have in stock. The long and short of it, though, is that the unit was dead-on-arrival.
Initial impressions: Purple plastic casing looks like an attempt to appeal to the Iomega and Compaq fans. The bottom edges and corners of the casing are very sharp-- beware!
The unit came with three blank CD-R discs. I thought that was pretty classy.
Software includes Toast for the Mac, as well as Silverlining Pro (a disk management utility); the install process was a bit unclear as to where the drivers actually were (they're in the Silverlining folder). Parts of the documentation say to install all software before powering-up the drive, and other parts say that you should power it up first and the system will recognize it automatically.
It powered-up normally, and while it did seem pretty noisy, I figured it was par for the course for a CD-RW (I didn't have any previous experience by which to judge). But it never showed up in the System Profiler; the FireWire bus stubbornly said "No devices found on bus". I didn't know whether it was supposed to or not. Eventually I found out that yes, a correctly operating unit should show up in the System Profiler, even if you haven't installed drivers for it. It should see it as a drive and mount discs you put in it.
LaCie's tech support (free) was sympathetic but a little dense; it took some effort to convey the idea that it was a hardware problem with the drive itself, not a driver conflict between iTunes and Toast (which would have come into play if I'd been able to get to the point of burning a CD). They only support Toast, and don't have any useful information on iTunes-- they gave me to understand that right away.
Anyway, I took the drive back to the point of purchase and tested it on the in-store demo G4, where it behaved exactly the same way mine did-- never showed up in the System Profiler. I then tried their LaCie display unit, and it popped up immediately in the System Profiler with FireWire ID tags and (when it was powered on) an additional "Authoring Support" tag. Putting a CD into the drive mounted it promptly, as expected.
So, my only useful experience with this drive is with the in-store unit, and I didn't get to do any actual burning with it. I would actually have been willing to go home with another LaCie drive if they'd had one in stock, but since they didn't, I'm going with the Yamaha CRW2100FXZ. Sorry, LaCie.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
btman
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Location: San Jose, CA
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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