Commodore 1541

Summary

The VC1541 is a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive released by Commodore for the C64 in 1982. It has only one read/write head, so it can access only one side of a disk at a time. Each side holds around 170 KiB.

The floppy disk drive is an independent computer with a 6502 CPU. With clever programming, it can perform calculations in parallel with the C64.

Users describe the drive as “snail carousel” due to its slowness – floppy speeders such as Turbo Nibbler accelerate it. The biggest problem, however, is the overheating by the built-in power supply, which only solves the third generation VC1541-II in 1987; the second generation does not solve the temperature problem, but it has a new housing colour.

Later drives using 5¼-inch media included the 1570 (1985) and the 1571 (a double-sided drive, 1985). The 1581 disk drive (1987) also allowed 3.5-inch disks to be used with the C64/128.