Acomdata Tango Pro USB 2.0/Firewire 400/Firewire 800 2.5-Inch Hard Drive Enclosure TNGXXXUFBE-BLK (Black)

I have the Acomdata Tango Pro 2.5-inch SATA disk enclosure with USB 2.0, Firewire 400 and 800 I/O ports on the back. It also has a small 5v DC power jack just in case your I/O port DC power is marginal or weak. I needed the various I/O ports as I have a number of different PC's and Macs where I plan to use this enclosure. I tested the Acomdata and my disk on all of them and none required that I supply 5v DC to the enclosure. The enclosure does not ship with a 5v DC wall wart adapter but you'll probably never need it anyway.Mine shipped with 1-meter (3-feet) long FW400, FW800, and an incorrect USB 2.0 cable. The Acomdata supplied USB cable came with a rather large type-B connector typically used to attach to a printer. The enclosure needs a Mini-USB style connector. No big deal as I happened to have the correct cable from another project.I'm using the enclosure to house my 128GB 2.5-inch OCZ brand SATA Solid-State Disk. Installation was a snap but I highly recommend having a very small philips screw driver handy as the back panel screws on the enclosure are pretty small. You unscrew the two back panel screws then push on the I/O port connectors which slides the entire assembly out from the front of the case. Slide your 2.5-inch SATA disk onto the SATA connector and secure the disk from the bottom four mounting holes using the Acomdata supplied screws. Slide the assembly back into the case and secure it from the back panel using the two tiny philips screws. Fit and finish are very good on this enclosure and the back panel tolerances are a bit tight but if you align everything just right, it will go back together perfectly.I tested my enclosure with the OCZ 2.5-Inch SSD on three PC's and three Macs using USB 2.0, FW400, and FW800. It worked perfectly on all the computers including a 5 year old HP tower PC via USB 2.0 and FW400, 2 year old Dell tower PC via USB 2.0, and a 2 year old Lenovo laptop via USB 2.0. FW400 and FW800 worked on my two year old Intel MacBook Pro 15-Inch. FW400 worked on my Intel MacMini and FW800 worked on a 1 year old Intel iMac.I'm very pleased that all interfaces worked flawlessly on this enclosure. The case gets a little warm with the OCZ SSD inside but not hot and the front panel blue LED is bright but not annoying (to me anyway).Just for grins I decided to test large-file disk write speeds using USB 2.0 vs FW800 on the MacBook Pro. I used the OCZ SSD partitioned using the Mac's Disk Utility and called it "SSD". This was a simple test using command line utilities built into Mac OS X from a terminal window:cd /Volumes/SSDtime mkfile 1g TEST <Enter>This times the creation of a 1GB file called TEST and returns the timed result once completed.USB 2.0 took 45 secondsFW800 took 19 secondsFW800 is obviously much faster than USB 2.0 but I'm sure that FW800 is still the bottleneck vs what the SSD is really capable of. As a comparison my LaCie 7200rpm disk via FW800 performed about the same as the SSD. eSATA would be faster but since I have no eSATA interfaces on any of my computers or on this particular enclosure I didn't test using that I/O technology.In any case, the enclosure is well built, versatile, and it's doing what it's supposed to w/o any issues. 5 Stars!P.S. The model with the FW800 interface is still rather pricey as of this writing so if you can get by with USB 2.0 or FW400, I believe that model is about half the price.

I'd like to recommend this product, but unfortunately I cannot. The problem is that it simply does not handle the full power range required by the specs.The first version of this device I got refused to run my drive (a solid state drive using about 6W of power) via FW. I sent it back and was told its FW ports were bad. The replacement has FW ports that work --- but that STILL don't support the full 7W that FW supplies. The situation on the USB side isn't much better --- a low-power drive that should run off a single USB connection requires two USB connection to get it spinning.All this may seem like so much technical mumbo-jumbo to you, the reader, but it matters. When you buy a drive and insert it into an enclosure like this, you just expect things to work --- you plug it into your computer and life is good. You don't expect that things will sorta appear to work until you write a lot of data to the disk, at which point it disconnects from your computer because the drive doesn't have the power it needs and has reset itself. You expect that, unless you are buying some really weird drive, standard 2.5 inch drives will just work off a single USB or FW connection.AcomData seem well aware of the power limitations of this drive --- the manual that comes with it devotes most of its pages to explaining how to use the cables they gave to "top up" the FW connection with extra power from USB. Apart from the fact of WTF should I be doing this, none of their suggestions ever worked for me.My recommendation -- skip this. Life is too short to dick around with products that don't properly support standards (in this case, power standards) and that appear to work and then stop work apparently randomly.

Like a few others here, I am seeing that I need a power adapter or my drive won't mount. I put a Hitachi 320GB 7200 rpm drive in this case, and I'm using it with a mid-2007 MacBook Pro (Santa Rosa 2.2Ghz, 10.6.2).I bought this case specifically to use FW800 and bus power. I already had an eSATA case for the Hitachi, but my eSATA express card was flaky and of course that case required a power adapter. I'm a musician that needs a portable and reliable rig, and I don't like having wall warts to deal with every time I set up for a gig. I'm considering returning this because I'm pretty sure my MBP delivers the correct amount of current through its FW ports to run this drive (I have no issues with other bus-powered cases). The curious thing is that when I first put the drive in this case, it DID work with bus power. However I didn't try doing any heavy lifting at that time, I only saw that the drives mounted OK. I just got back from a recording session where the engineer put 1.5 gigs of files on this drive in one shot. The drive mounted OK on his older Mac G4 desktop using FW400, and the file transfer went fine. Now the drive won't mount using bus power. Could it be that there's circuitry on the bridge board of this case that regulates the bus power to the drive, and it failed after the larger-than-usual file transfer?Also, as others have noted, the case does get pretty warm. As others say, it might be the aluminum dissipating the heat, which is a good thing, but I've has several of these 2.5" cases and none of them have gotten as warm as this one.