Kryofluxing PC floppies
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 51/4"^3disks. 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 51/4"^3 media is very far from simple. Let's start with the easy part. Imaging 3"^3 media is relatively simple because PC 3"^3drives are straightforward (well, let's omit the special Japanese 1.6M media). 3"^3 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.