Commodore 1541

storage The best know floppy disk drive for the Commodore64. The 1541 was a single sided 160 Kb drive but converting to

flippy disks would give another 160 Kb.

The disk drive used Group Code Recording and contained a

6502 processor as a disk controller. Some people wrote

code for it to vibrate the head at different frequencies to

play tunes.

The transfer rate was about 300 bytes per second. The 1541

used a bit-serial version of the IEEE 488 parallel

protocol. Some third-party speed-ups could transfer about 4

kilobytes per second over the interface, and some "fast

loaders" managed up to 10 kbps.

The Commodore 1570 was an upgraded 1541 for use with the

Commodore 128.

(2000-03-07)