Wow; $192 for a 5.25" floppy disk drive

Fred Cisin wrote: Will they all read / write FM density, and allow raw bit-level access to the track data coming from the floppy drive, though? I think that's what we're hoping for from a data imaging device... Actually, there's perhaps three different projects that would be useful to tackle: 1) Off-the-shelf imaging box using a stock FDC chip capable of MFM and FM (with little ability to handle faulty media) 2) Custom imaging box [ which may mean scrap PC + extras ] that does data sampling at the drive digital interface level and reconstruction ( / deconstruction) in software. 3) Custom imaging box which hooks to the floppy drive's heads directly and uses a DAC / ADC; essentially as option 2 but can cope with marginal signal levels to reconstruct data. Option 1 I think is reasonably well covered with things like Imagedisk. Option 3 would be rather useful to a lot of us, but is a lot of work, both to design and set up on a per-drive basis. Option 2 is more middle ground, and seems to be within the realms of something that can be designed using a fairly low parts count and (hopefully) built by most hobbyists. Unless I'm completely misreading the discussion :-) cheers Jules