Commodore 1541

The 1541 was the standard floppy disk drive for the Commodore 64. It used 5.25-inch disks and stored about 170 kilobytes on each side.

A computer of its own

Inside the 1541 is its own 6502 processor and memory. The drive runs Commodore DOS by itself and talks to the computer over a serial cable.

Famously slow

That serial link moves only a few hundred bytes a second, so a big game could take minutes to load. The wait gave rise to fast loader cartridges and, later, JiffyDOS, which cut loading times many times over.

Other quirks

Owners remember the head rattling against its stop when a disk would not read, and drives drifting out of alignment. Many users cut a notch in their disks with a hole punch so they could use the second side.

Today

The C64 Ultimate recreates 1541 drives in hardware and loads disk images from USB or microSD.