Amiga floppies on an external USB drive?

[alberonn]

I remember when I had my Amiga that the Amiga floppies could not be read due to the PeeCee's floppy controller. However, with a card such as the old Catweasel, you could use a "standard" PeeCee floppy drive to read and write disks.

My questions is if you have an external USB drive, could it be possible--likely with some additional software--to read and write to actual Amiga floppies on a Windoze/Lunux/ect. system? This would be great for emulators as well as for preservation purposes.

When I was the Amiga librarian of a users group, I realized that we had a big problem with the magnetic media degrading and our library was disappearing. I think it behooves us to save as much as we can before all the great Amiga software vanishes.

[alberonn]

Cool, I was hoping someone was working on that project. I am also glad that there are Catweasel alternatives coming out there. I mean, when I had my A2000 and later my A4000, I liked Jens' stuff. However, I remember that the software for the Windoze box CW was not really finished from the reading I've done.

If we use a USB floppy drive, I was wondering is a special driver or some other software could be written that would allow for a much cheaper option to reading the classic disks or are there some issues preventing us from doing that?