Commodore 1581

storage Commodore Business Machines's 3.5 inch diskdrive for the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128. The drive

stores 800 kilobytes using an MFM format which is

different from both messy-dos 720 kb, and the Amiga 880 kb

formats.

The 1581 supports a poor imitation of directories which are

really just partitions and largely unused. It also supports

burst loading like the Commodore 1571, but is actually

faster as it is better designed. It has 3160 blocks free

when formatted.

The 1581 is the highest density C64 serial bus drive made by

Commodore. However Creative Micro Designs (CMD) make the

FD2000 (1.6MB) and (until recently) the FD4000 (3.2MB)

3.5" disk drives. GEOS users like 1581s as they are very

fast when used with GEOS.

See also Commodore 1541, Commodore 1571.

(1998-12-23)