External BluRay Drive Max Speed Issue

I just got the same buner and am having the same problem. I have Verbatim 6x BD-R discs and am using Toast Titanium 11 with firewire. Every once in a while I see the current write speed flash from 1x to 2x back to 1x. I tried changing the write speed from "best" to 6x with no improvement. I found it interesting that this Lacie branded device shows up as a Pioneer BD-RW BDR-208M in Disk Utility.

I was on the phone with Lacie for a while today. While troubleshooting, we were able to get speeds that avereaged 3x while burning data, but only 1x while buring a video Blu-ray. Toast does all the converting before it starts burning, so we couldn't figure out why it was so much slower making a video disc. Also, it should burn faster than 3x for data. I have opened a support case with Roxio which was a nightmare. Waiting on a reply from them. I'll need to try to burn from Compressor and directly from Finder, then compare the results.

Two things that haven't been mentioned, so I'll mention them:

1. Is there any chance that these are RW discs? This may seem a dumb question since I don't even know if such things exist, but "regular" RW (re-writable) discs have always been IME waaaay slower than -R/+R discs.

2. How much free space do you have on your boot drive? I'm thinking that for a BR disc (which holds about 25GB full IIRC) you'd need 50-100GB free for temp space or more. Might even need to be contiguous free space, I don't know enough about BR burning to know.

We use Retrospect to backup to encrypted disk images (sized for 25 GB blu-ray) and burn the filled .dmg files to blu-ray disks. At our current run-rate, we're buring about 150-200 of these per year.

We usually get well-priced Ridata bulk media that's sold as 4x or 6x but find that Toast rates them at 8x or 10x. To help ensure reliability, we're conservative with burn rates and normally burn at 4x, sometimes at 6x and have about 2% of the burned media that fails verification. We've often restored from blu-ray media that's many months old and have had no problems. A few times, I've restored from blu-ray media over a year old, also without problems. I've restored from DVD media that's over 5 years old, without issues (we nearly always used DVD-R+ media).

We've always used Pioneer external burners (including when we used to burn CDs then DVDs) in an Otherworld Computing case via FireWire (no, I'm not affiliated with Pioneer nor with OWC but have dealt with OWC for about 15 years). In our experience, the Pioneer burners are natively supported by OS X, are inexpensive and are also quite reliable -- we typically do 300-500 burns before replacing a unit, though we've not yet reached that point with the blu-ray burners. Currently we have 2 Pioneer blu-ray burner models; one BDR-206 and one BDR-208 and the backups are always burned on the newest model.

We use Toast for burning, currently v11 but I think we switched from DVDs to blu-ray with Toast v10. We've used both OS X 10.6 and OS X 10.8 for burning blu-rays (we skipped 10.7). The main system used to do the burns is a 2.66 GHz core 2 duo with 4 GB of memory (running 10.6.8 server) and the BDR-206 is attached to an iMac 3.4 GHz Core i7 with 16 GB of memory (running 10.8.3).

For us, all this works very reliably and we have no problems getting burn rates of 4x and 6x. Hope this helps.

Don't know if this helps, but Pioneer's page on supported media:

http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Computer/Computer+Drives/BDR-208DBK+Media +Support+List

Don't be surprised that LaCie uses a Pioneer drive. LaCie repackages HDDs and Storage drives into their own cases. Actually, most brands are just names on a case. (except Seagate and WD which have their own drives in plastic, unfriendly cases). And that drive can handle up to 15x, not just 12x.

If you are using a MacPro (which model?), have you thought about putting in a BD burner direct into one of the optical drive bays? Make sure you have the correct model (Sata for Sata, Pata for Pata) otherwise you will need some kind of bridge/adaptor. That way, you isolate the LaCie Bridge, and Firewire from the picture.