Is there a Catweasel like device for hard disks?

Andrew Lynch wrote: To the best of my knowledge, no - and I've been keeping an ear to the ground for such things for a while (plus it's a discussion which crops up here every once in a while, but I don't believe anyone's produced any working hardware yet). The speeds involved (particularly if over-sampling the data) are reasonably high - enough that it'd be tricky[1] to throw something together out of OTS TTL parts. That puts such a project more within the realm of people who know all about interfacing to high speed microcontrollers, and the pool of available carbon units with the time, skills and inclination to make such a device is pretty darn small. [1] perhaps impossible. I think some TTL parts will run up to 60MHz or so with a good design and layout, but even that is perhaps a bit on the slow side when dealing with ST412 drives and doing any reasonable oversampling. cheers Jules