Introduction

The Sands Expo and Convention Center is located behind the Venetian and hosts a Mini CES. While the Sands Expo is officially part of CES the cost is far less than being on the LLVC show floor. For this reason we see a lot of smaller and start-up companies at the Sands Expo. And sometimes we see the most innovative and interesting products here. Read on to see the companies we talked to at the Sands Expo and what they showed us.

Tagan

One product that I really liked from Tagan was their new BZ series of power supplies. These power supplies will come in wattages from 700 to 1300. One thing that really sets them apart from other power supplies is the modular cables. The cables on the BZ series are round and color coded, but where they connect to the power supply is illuminated with the color of the cable, very interesting and unique. The BZ series also features a 135mm blue LED fan and an 80 PLUS rating. Tagan also will be producing 1100W and 1300W ESA versions of this power supply.

As far as cases are concerned Tagan was showing 2 newer cases the El Diablo and Monolith. The El Diablo is the world's first case with a 360mm side fan. That's right 360mm, it's HUGE! The case also features a very large 250mm front intake fan. Both fans on the El Diablo are illuminated with blue LED's. The Monolith features a unique rubber-coated front panel. It also features 2x 250mm side fans.

Tagan is also doing a lot of things with storage under the ICY BOX name. The enclosure that I liked the best was the IB-285, which is a 2.5-inch SATA enclosure that is made to look like a small date book. Even more interesting is that the latch on it is actually the USB connector. Swappable storage is becoming popular again and Tagan is right there with a whole lineup of products. They have 2.5-inch (IB-266StUSD) and 3.5-inch (IB-390StUSD) external hard drive enclosures that feature swappable bays. So you can take your work from home, and easily take it with you to work.

Moving on to network-attached storage (NAS) Tagan also has a solution for that. They offer a wide variety of NAS devices from 1 bay all the way up to 4 bay devices. All of their NAS devices feature gigabit Ethernet, one touch backup, NFS, FTP, DHCP, UPnP, and iTunes support, a USB connection, and an easy configuration via a web browser.

Finally Tagan showed us their IB-MP307 multimedia external enclosure. This 2.5-inch SATA hard drive enclosure features HDMI, component, S-Video, RCA, and optical out for audio. So you are able to watch movies and videos that are stored on your hard drive on your TV. You can put files on the device via the USB port or over Ethernet or wireless.