I firmly believe this is the best storage device ever produced by Commodore. I so clearly remember at the time it came out the sheer amount of storage available was incredible. I also remember they were prohibativly expensive. My father finally bought me one towards the end of my Commodore years. I remember I couldn't afford to buy any disks for it for many weeks. So I just used the one disk that came with it with the tools and stuff on it. It held so much that it wasn't a problem. However, it soon became clear that the 1581 had a lot of limitations. All of these were due to legacy problems. Almost all commercial software was designed for the 1541 disk drive. Even if you copied the data over, it still wouldn't work from a 1581 due to copy protection issues. If you were lucky enough to have "cracked" versions of the software, often you could get those to work. So the 1581 ended up being good for data storage and great if you ran a BBS or GEOS. The speed was better than any other unmodified Commodore drive. But you couldn't really own a Commodore computer and have this be your one and only drive. You'd be stuck not being able to play any games (due to the previously mentioned issue) Ironicly, it is the only drive I use now. Most of the time I'm just tinkering or programming my Commodore (most often my Commodore DTV) and therefor the 1581 is the drive of choice due to its small size and high data capacity.
This particular drive cost me more than it should. I bought it AS-IS from a used electronics store for $80. The power switch was jammed in the off position. I thought that would be all the repair it would need. Eventually I sent the motherboard to Ray Carleson and he repaired it for me. It required a new WD controller chip, and a new EPROM. Also the power supply was bad. I cut it open with a dremel and replaced the capacitors inside and it worked again. Oh, and of course the power switch had to be replaced. Amazingly Commodore uses the same switch on the C64 motherboard. I had a dead one laying around so I took that one. So now it works, but I spent more time and money on it than I could have bought a working one off of ebay for.
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