Michael Steil gives a great run-through of the 1541, including a short history of Commodore floppy disk drives. In addition to explaining the hardware and firmware, he outlines some fastloader and copy protection techniques.
If you like this video, be sure to watch The Ultimate C64 Talk.
TL;DR: Today I’ve released a C64 tool: CBM Disk Transfer Benchmark.
Please don’t make any more YouTube videos measuring load times with smartphone stopwatch apps. Thanks!
Read below for my ruminations.
Click for charts
The 1541 disk drive that my family got along with a Commodore 64 and 1702A monitor was slow. Really slow. The slow speed of the 1541 disk drive is legendary. I won’t go into the whole backstory from Commodore, but what it meant in my house was that most of the games we had on disk took a very long time to load.