Last year I finally bought a Kryoflux, unfortunately in the middle of moving house. Now I’m finally able to use it beyond verifying that it’s not completely broken. After imaging a few dozens of floppies, I can say one thing–Kryoflux is surprisingly difficult to use with PC 5¼″disks. There is a distinct impression that Kryoflux was designed to deal primarily with Amiga and C64 floppies, and although PC floppy formats present absolutely no difficulty for the Kryoflux hardware as such, using the software for archiving standard PC 5¼″ media is very far from simple.
Let’s start with the easy part. Imaging 3½″ media is relatively simple because PC 3½″drives are straightforward (well, let’s omit the special Japanese 1.6M media). 3½″ drives always rotate at 300 RPM and usually automatically handle media density based on the floppy itself. But if everything were easy, life wouldn’t be very interesting.
Preserving the data on these ancient floppies is crucial, and it’s great to see various types of specialised hardware exist just for this purpose.
About reading old floppies, an interesting open source (hardware and software) project to keep an eye on is FluxEngine: http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/
Here is another vote for the FluxEngine. I have only recently started working with it, but it is opensource, the hardware is available (and cheap (USD 10.- plus shipping lwhen I bought one). The only downside so far is that the current hardware requires a Windows-only program to program and update the firmware, so far I haven’t been able to make PSoC Creator work under Wine.
Thanks for the links to the FluxEngine. Very interesting. I have some old diskettes that this could help to read.
I bought a KryoFlux.. I hate it though as it is almost entirely proprietary. I especially dislike the attitude of it’s developers as elitist, “we know how to do things best” not anyone else.
The FluxEngine looks like a good way forward.