As it happens,

I'm presently working on one of those financially unrewarding but desperately needed (by too few people to make it fnancially rewarding) items in the form of a USB-interfaced FDC capable of dealing with 3-1/2", 5-1/4", and 8" soft- and hard-sectored FDD's. I'm using an 805x-type MCU with two UARTs, a bit of external SRAM, an SMC FDC9266 FDC, and an FTDI DLP245UM USB interface. An Altera CPLD handles the data steering and "glue" logic. All these components were chosen, not for price, but, for availability and ease of implementation, not to mention the common 5-volt supply.

When complete, it should be able to handle most FM/MFM-formatted soft-sectored media, depending, of course, on the driver software. It should also be able to sample, in the same manner as done by the once-popular "CatWeasel" FDC, any other data modulation schemes or data formats, whether hard-sectored or soft-sectored, by taking four/eight samples per bit window and shuffling those off to the host PC as a blocked byte stream.

This thing is necessary because there are people with FDD's that have media that a PC can't conveniently read/write.

There are USB FDC's, but they seem only to handle 3-1/2" drives. It's not difficult to handle that shortcoming with cabling, but, by the time you're dealing with 8" drives, the number of details that have to be managed seems to be too much for the combination of PC's and PC-developers, particularly where hard-sectored media are involved. In this case, I'm doing the hardware and ensuring the low-level function of the device and leaving the "heavy lifting" in the form of driver software at the 805x for purposes of managing anything beyond seeks, sector reads and writes. and formatting, to the end-user.

RE