Integral Peripherals Inc, which back in December promised to ship in the second quarter a 170Mb version of its Viper 1.8 disk drive configured to fit into a PCMCIA slot drives (CI No 2,319), now says that it has been shipping the thing since March 18, and claims that it the highest capacity PCMCIA drive available. It has also improved the non-operating shock specification for both Viper 105 and Viper 170 drives has been increased to 750 Gs; it suggests that independent testing has shown that contact start-stop drives typically fail at 300 G of non-operating shock due to the read-write heads impacting the disk surface, generating debris and damaging the disk medium, and therefore uses a proprietary dynamic ramp loading system that ensures that the read-write heads never come in contact with the recording surface of the disk. The Boulder, Colorado company gave no prices for the new disk card drive.
