Hello,
A few months ago I found out that Hatari was very useful to access physical Atari-formatted drives.
The main usage for me is to be able to plug my Falcon CF-card on my PC though a CF-USB adapter and to access the drive directly with Hatari. Then I can transfer files using a shared folder mounted as a GEMDOS emulated drive.
I don't know if it's something that was already tried but I can confirm it works on Linux: just change the IDE HDD drive in the config file to point to the Atari drive (for instance /dev/sdd).
There is some drawbacks though:
1/ The UI doesn't allow to select a physical drive
2/ It doesn't work on Windows (too bad since my main computer is a W10 machine so I need another computer just to make that transfer)
3/ On Linux Hatari must be executed as root
4/ It doesn't work when emulating a Falcon with TOS 4.04 (four bombs at boot, latest HDDRIVER), but it works with STE emulation & TOS 2.06. Then unfortunately partitions >256MB are not available.
I wanted to make that feedback so that maybe this could become a documented feature (and maybe official Linux/Windows support?).
Cyril