That’s not the only trick Procom was able to pull at Comdex: it reckons that IBM is short-changing PS/2 users in terms of the disk drives it offers, and it has unveiled the Pira 50-70, 50-100 and 50-200, internal Micro Channel-interfaced hard drives with 70Mb, 100Mb and 200Mb of zero-slot storage for IBM PS/2 Models 50 and 50z. Replacing the riser arm on the Model 50z or the ST-506 controller on the Model 50, the new drives are claimed to be over 200% faster than IBM’s installed hard drives and can expand the internal capacity of the machines more than eight times. The 3.5 internal drives are fully-compatible with MS-DOS, OS/2 and Novell NetWare and have access times of 18mS for 70Mb, 25mS for 100Mb and 18mS for 200Mb. IBM offers only 20Mb or 30Mb drives for the 80286-based models, with snail- (or floppy-) like 80mS access time on the 20Mb, 33mS on the 30Mb. The Pira drives come with with all hardware, cabling and documentation needed to plug them in and go. The 70Mb costs $1,200, the 100Mb is $1,900 and the 200Mb, $2,700.
