the drives in the Amiga were 'special'
Not really. They have some extra circuitry to enable daisy chaining up to four drives, but that's it. The extra signals that the drives have can be produced with some wires on a peecee drive's circuit board. Did it once back in my teens. My mom thought a replacement Amiga drive was too expensive, so I had to make do with a peecee drive. Got it to work with a few wires. Didn't work with extra drives, of course.
The big difference is the controller in the peecee. That thing is the reason peecees can't read Amiga formatted disks.
