Catweasel Mk1-3 not suitable for archiving - why?

[Jim Battle]

Philip Pemberton wrote:
...
> Now what I'd like to know is, what part of the Catweasel's design 
> prevents it from being used for archiving discs?

Some people expect that just because they paid $100 for the card that 
professional grade drivers should exist for every possible disk format.

Yes, the hardware does cost ~$100, but just about all you are buying is 
the card.  The software is all done via hobbyist activity, with the 
quality, consistency, and support you might expect.

Prior to the Mk IV design, writing to hard sectored formats was not 
really possible (unless you count writing a track blindly with semi 
arbitrary rotational phase, then attempting to read it back and starting 
over if it didn't work counts as possible).  Mk IV has added some 
mechanisms for having the hardware wait until index/sector marks are 
seen before initiating a write.