[ricouille]

I have a Firewire Powerbook G3 400mhz and am looking into buying a firewire CD-RW. I have been doing alot of research and it seems like the Que Fire 16x10x40x and the LaCie 16x10x40x firewire drives are the best/most economical out there. Does anybody have any experience with either of these drives (problems they have had or heard of) and would recommend one over the other? Speed is less of an issue for me than reliability.

Thanks

[Immortal K-Mart Employee]

Easy question.

I have the Que
My Friend has the LaCie

Que:
Over 100 CD's made, not ONE dud.
Comes with Nice Carrying bag
No Fan
Nice and curvy
Works in iTunes, OSX, Toast
Always on.

LaCie:
No Bag
VERY VERY Loud fan
5 CD's made, 2 duds.
Cunkey
Has USB and Firewire

You decide.
Can only turn on when in use or you will hear that horrid fan.

[OldManMac]

We sell the LaCie drives where I work, and we have not had problem one with the. We sold Que drives for a little while last year, and we couldn't get the to work with some PowerBooks.

I have a Que, I have a Lacie burner.

Que:
Less that 30 CD's made, drive is dead.
Comes with Nice Carrying bag. True.
No Fan. Also true.
Nice and curvy. Depends on your taste.
Works in iTunes, OSX, Toast. So does the Lacie.
Always on. Whoop de doo.
My additions:
I can't return it for service, because the buggers won't return my messages (email or phone). No rebate ever arrived. Their CS is brutal (or non-existent). Search the forums for more details about this. Of course, if you're lucky like I.K.E. up there, then you don't have to worry about it.

LaCie:
No Bag - whoop de doo
VERY VERY Loud fan - its one fault, but I like it off when I don't use it
Over 500 CDs made, including 200 in a weekend - no problem.
Cunkey - what's cunkey? The new casing is nice.
Has USB and Firewire. true.
Customer service - don't know about the CDRWs, but they sure fixed the HD I had a problem with easily, and I got my rebate.

You decide.

[lucylawless]

I had a Que!Fire 4x4x24
Now I have a Lacie 16x10x40

Que:
Customer service is awful
Their rebate partner company finally did send the rebate, but only after 6 months and 3 long distance phone calls, the last of which ended in the phrase, "ok, I guess you've waited long enough; I'll mail it right now" yuck.
From reading these boards and my own experience, I would say that about 90% of the drives work flawlessly. But for the ones with problems, you're SOL
I didn't realize this was such a problem until yesterday when I got my LaCie, but the que drive was incapable of reading any discs. This includes Toast's 'verification'. I could mount a CD about half the time, but if any actual data was read, a hard freeze was my reward.
It was (is) completely useless in OS X.
I tried replacing the internal (Mitsumi) drive with a 12x Plextor. I had the same problems. Even if the Mitsumi was responsible for some things, you never know what you're going to get inside the Que casing, and I'm convinced the Que board was responsible for most of my problems.
The power converter often shorts out if I touch (or look at) it. Strangely, this has never caused a coaster.
From time to time, I had the biggest problems getting the drive to be recognized. For a period, the only way was to turn off the drive AND the computer for at least 3 hours!
To its credit, though, I've burned hundreds of discs, and had less than 1% coasters. I won't miss it, though

LaCie:
I've only had it for two days, but I can read AND write in 9 AND X. (finally!)
it is very loud, but who cares? turn it off, put it under a pillow...
LaCie was polite on the phone, and they handle their own rebates (if this thread is still around in 6 weeks I'll let you know if I get mine)
I think it's a little uglier than the Que
I'm very happy with it

[tonyibook]

I have just received a Freecom Portable II 16x4x40 Firewire. It uses an NEC 7800 burn proof mechanism.

It is one of the nicest looking drives I have seen. No fan, it uses an external power adaptor. When burning at 16 speed you can barely hear it at all. When you disconnect the drive from the Mac the drive powers off, there is no power switch.

I got mine with a Firewire cable but you can also buy USB, USB2, PCMCIA and Parallel Port cables. The drive is £150 direct from Freecom. The Firewire interface/cable cost £50.

I am running Mac OS X 10.1 on a PowerBook G3 Pismo. Works fine with the 10.1 disc burner. All functions are supported via Disk Copy and Disk Utility applications. It took me a while to find out how to erase a CD-RW, but you can do it from Disk Copy.

Works fine with Toast Titanium OS X PR2, but does not work with iTunes 1.1.2. Hopefully it will with iTunes 2. At the moment I can create audio discs using Toast.