Commodore Cave - 1581 Floppy Disk Drive

Welcome to the C=ommodore Cave. In this video I look at
the Commodore 3.5 inch - 1581 Floppy Disk Drive.


Thanks for watching. I invite you to subscribe, comment and check out my other vids

[mcd]

The 1581 was a rare drive (and expensive!) when it came out late in the life of the C64. It would have been great earlier bundled with GEOS. Good on you for getting a a good example of it.

[aussie_retro_dude]

Great video. I'm late to the party, just found and subscribed to your channel ! Nice to see someone in Australia producing these videos . I'm in Adelaide .

[barryon]

Mine was the favorite part of my C-128 system once upon a time. It went to my cousin when I got a PC XT.

[mgas]

I kind of want one but they are running $250 or so. It's a bit rough to justify when I have several 1541's and Pi1541's/SD2IEC's running much less. Well done again Graham :)

[Nighthawke]

The 1581 had several undocumented and unused features that required the C-128 to exploit them. First and foremost was the burst feature it had. There is a demo of it on the Test/Demo disk that comes with the drive. There were others, including nested directories and native partitioning.

I used my 1581 with GEOS, using a GEOSBoot disk that was specially made for the 1581. It came in handy when my master GEOS master boot disk went south due to be run so hard and so often, RIP. I could copy some, but not all my games and applications over to it, especially my public domain applications over to the 3.5" floppies, which loaded much faster and didn't give me trouble like the 1541 would, but it would still give the track 41 rattle error when operating in the native 1541 mode. I still got mine along with my collection of 3.5"s.

[HansCampbell]

I had 6 of these Commodore 1581 disk drives, all of them like new in their original boxes. I kept 2 of them, for my personal collection. I sold the other 4 drives for $600.00 each ( $2, 400.00 total ). I do not use my Commodore 8-bit computers that much any more, because I have Commodore Amiga computers. I got bored with the Commodore 64 computer way back in 1985. So, after buying my first Atari 520ST computer, and my first Amiga 1000 computer, I never looked back at any of that 8-bit crap. I mean, who in their right mind would?! 🤔

[boulderdashc]

Very cool. The amount of games you could put on one of those!

[argoneum]

When I was a kid, and C128DCR was my primary computer I wanted 1581 soooo badly… was unobtanium here though

[IanMicheal]

Great mate :) commodore always kept up with me.. I Now do coding for dreamcast in that world of homebrew.. my heart is still with the commodore :) first love and all that :) I do wish i had one of these drives back in australia at the time.. most of us had cassette tapes lol.. Which was ok because we got the best loader tunes most were better then the game at the end hehe..

[thenovicesretroreview]

Great video that drive seems minuscule compared to my 1541, also it looks like you are nearly to a 1000 subscribers. So congratulations on that!

[CityXen]

Great overview of all the storage options

[alexandermirdzveli]

Another marvelous review. Thanks a lot!

[CiociariaStorica]

Good job! I wanted this stuff a lot in the '80 and '90... Perhaps in the future. I Ave a U1541 II+ but the real hardware is always better 👍🏻
Ciao from Italy and sorry for my English 🙂.

[urvelotumpelo]

Great stuff. I didn't even know C64 can handle 3.5" disks.

[randomscribblings]

My school had an 8250 ... which is a double-sided double-density 8050.

[bob]

I had one to go with my C128D. I can't remember how much I paid for it but the price you quoted sounds way to high for what I would have spent back then; couldn't imagine I would have plunked down any more than $200. I will say, it kept my C128D relevant for a few more years because of the IBM format compatibility (which I think you kind of dismissed too easily). This was particularly when using GEOs on both the CMD and IBM computers.

[skeletorrobo]

I saw this as commodore cave got a mention on 8 bit show and tell.

[SuperVstech]

I have two of these, I bought it with a C=128, and geos OS, I never got it to reliably work with the database properly... still, it was a great storage solution to the 1541

[steiniapproved]

I may be wrong but I think using HD disks in this drive could have an effect on the reliability of the data stored on disk. If I remember correctly, due to DD and HD disks having different magnetic characteristics, they require different "strengths" of how the head writes the data to disk. I assume, the reason that it works for you is that during read it is still between the tolerances; that doesn't mean that it will be readable as long as it could be read using DD disks where the 1581 could store the data exactly how it was meant to be. The reason that 1, 44 MB PC floppy drives could handle both in an optimal way has been that the drive could control the different parameters because of the switch probing for presence/absence of the HD hole.

[BitNaptime]

Don't forget the metal case 2031.