LaCie intros 8x Blu-ray Disc burner

LaCie on Monday introduced its 8x d2 Blu-ray Disc drive. It’s priced at $449.99.

The external drive sports both USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 data interfaces. It’s compatible with both Macs and Windows PCs and ships with software (including Toast 9 Titanium).

The drive can burn up to 50GB of data on a single dual-layer BD-R disc, and can do so at 4x to 8x speed (limited to 6x using USB 2.0). Other formats it supports include BD-RE, DVD+-R, DVD+-RW, DVD+-R DL, CD-R and CD-RW.

The included software enables you to burn data files, videos, audio content and more to the drive. Blu-ray formats specifically supported by the drive include BD-ROM, BD-ROM AACS, BD-R and BD-RE (bear in mind that Mac OS X currently lacks the ability to play back Blu-ray Disc movies).