> The hardware you're talking about you can buy today.
Only sort of. The Greaseweazel and its ilk are sampling digital data. They're "seeing" the data after the analog front-end on the drive has processed it.
I'm talking about something that's more like reading the raw magnetic flux reversals in the analog domain, amplifying the signal, and writing it to another disk w/o ever leaving the analog domain. Exactly like a dubbing tape deck.
Edit:
I wrote this in another comment up-thread but, for completeness:
The Applesauce[0] project seems to do what I'm talking about. It samples analog signals from the drive, rather than the output of an ADC in the drive. No doubt the clever architecture of the Disk II drives is what allows for this.
Only sort of. The Greaseweazel and its ilk are sampling digital data. They're "seeing" the data after the analog front-end on the drive has processed it.
I'm talking about something that's more like reading the raw magnetic flux reversals in the analog domain, amplifying the signal, and writing it to another disk w/o ever leaving the analog domain. Exactly like a dubbing tape deck.
Edit:
I wrote this in another comment up-thread but, for completeness:
The Applesauce[0] project seems to do what I'm talking about. It samples analog signals from the drive, rather than the output of an ADC in the drive. No doubt the clever architecture of the Disk II drives is what allows for this.
[0] https://wiki.reactivemicro.com/Applesauce