Not that having one of these was ever anything to brag about. In fact it was almost an embarrasment if your friends had 1541 diskdrives! I believe Renee gave this to me with the C64. It is pretty sad, this is all I had when I used the Vic20 as my first computer. I hooked it up a few years ago just to remind me how long it took to load and save a program. It doesn't really keep up with a 10,000 RPM Ultra-Wide SCSI drive, does it?
However, in its defence. It was the most affordable storage device available at the time. When it first came out, most games were on cartridge and so a storage device was mainly needed to store your own programs and data. It also was the best dataset made for personal computers. Way better than the ones used by Tandy, Atari, or Timex Sinclair. Those just used an ordinary cassette recorder which took great pain to calibrate the recording and playback volumes to get a good save. And I remember being quite happy to have it. I couldn't count the number of times I wrote really big programs on my VIC-20. Some even filled up the RAM completely. Some I typed in out of magazines which took hours. Then I had to leave the computer on for days until I was done playing with it and was willing to turn it off and loose my program. I remember getting the dataset was a wonderfull thing being able to save my data. So, it may not be as good as a disk drive, but sure beats nothing at all! There was also a time many years later when I had no disk drive because it was broken. So having a copy of CCGMS terminal program saved on tape was a life saver. The cassette drive allowed me to still keep in touch on-line for a few months while my 1541 was down.
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