The Commodore 1551 floppy drive is a rare beauty. Designed for the
Commodore 264 series, it borrows the nice black look of the
Commodore Plus/4. It connects through the
parallel port, unlike the more common
1541 drive, which had a serial connection.
Because of the parallel connection, the 1551 was about 4 times faster than the 1541 by default. (
Disk turbos made it even faster, of course.)
The disk drive used regular (
single sided,
single density)
5 1/4 inch disks. Unfortunately the 1541 and 1551 were not
100% compatible. In the world
software releases for the 264 family, this has caused a big mess. Lots of
games and
demos were
1541 only, and did not work on the 1551 (because of a 1541-specific disk turbo). Strangely enough, the opposite was also true: a few games (made especially German
sceners) were
1551 only. This was very unfortunate, and it obviously showed that the
coders just didn't care, since it was easy to detect which drive was connected to a machine (and then use a drive specific disk turbo, if necessary).