Commodore 1541
<storage> The best know
floppy disk drive for the
Commodore 64.
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.
