CES 2009: Cirago Intros Media Center

By Jamie Sorcher -- TWICE, January 8, 2009

LAS VEGAS — Cirago International, a maker of storage and wireless solutions, unveiled its first media center along with several new products at its press conference here at International CES.

The CMC1000, housed in a sleek, compact 3.5-inch form factor, displays music, plays photos and plays videos in formats up to 720p or 1080i. Content is stored in the built-in hard disk drive, attached USB devices, memory cards or streamed through the built-in LAN interface.

Hard drives are available in either 500GB or 1TB versions with retail pricing of $199 and $259, respectively. The 1TB version can store more than 4 million photos, play more than 18,000 hours of music or record 1,500 hours of video. Both are expected to be available in the first quarter.

Stan Lim, general manager of Cirago, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., said this is the first of what may be three or four media centers that will be rolled out in the future.

The company also is introducing its new NAS and RAID storage solutions. The NAS1000 network external hard drive is designed for the home of small office network. It has simple set up and password security.

The Cirago 2.5 RMS1000 portable storage device uses two 2.5-inch hard disks mounted in one portable mini drive package. It can be configured for maximum storage, maximum speed or mirrored for data redundancy.

Finally, the Cirago RST1000 RAID, also suited for home or small office use, features two 3.5-inch SATA hard disks.