The 1581 disk drive is a quite uncommon 3.5 inch disk drive for the Commodore 64/128 machines. it was released in 1987.

Most users of the machines, especially in America had one of the 5.25 Inch disk drives, and there was little appetite among the software companies to offer their programmes on the 3.5 inch format.

The main benefit of using this disk format was the extra capacity and speed of the drive. As this was a double sided, double density drive, with a capacity of 800KB, it was the drive with the highest capacity Commodore ever made. There was additional Commodore DOS support inside for the creation of partitions.

It is also by far the smallest floppy drive in the Commodore range, it ran off an external PSU, and using smaller disks it was about two thirds the size of the 1541 II.

Commodore users were not used to the 3.5 inch format, and as a result sales of the 1581 were low. The situation was not helped initially by a very high failure rate. It found a niche in users who wanted to transfer data between a Commodore and a PC DOS machine.

Provenance :
The only 3.5 inch Commodore drive manufactured, most models being 5.25 inch.