The Catweasel does not fully replace the need for a real Amiga with its real Amiga disk drive. The Catweasel can read and write AmigaDOS disks, but it cannot read copy-protected Amiga disks. Also the software support is quite poor. From the Windows side you can almost only create or write back ADFs, you cannot access the files on the floppy disks. Within WinUAE you can use the Catweasel as an additional disk drive. It does not replace DF0, so you cannot boot WinUAE from it, but you can access the drive. Again you can only read and write AmigaDOS disks, not copy-protected disks. At least you can access files rather than disk images.
Lastly, would it be quicker to mount a ntfs hard drive (crossdos - I think this is possible) on amiga (A3000) load data from disks then take Hard Drive out and put on PC to use data that way?
There is no NTFS driver for AmigaOS, at least none that could write to the disk. You can only use FAT partitions.
As a one-time solution this is probably the easiest. So you put the HDD into your Amiga, copy all disks and then put it back to the PC. But as a long-term solution, e.g. to use the Amiga and the PC concurrently, I'd rather prefer a network connection.
The same applies to CD writers and ZIP drives. You always have to carry the medium from one computer to the other. As the lazy person which I am I prefer to access the Amiga's drives from the PC and vice versa.
Bye,
Thomas
