In 1983, the 1541 switched to the familiar beige case and a front label reading simply "1541" along with rainbow stripes to match the Commodore 64.

The company said that the shortage occurred because 90% of C64 owners bought the 1541 compared to its 30% expectation, but the press discussed what Creative Computing described as "an absolutely alarming return rate" because of defects.

Excelerator+, the MSD Super Disk single and dual drives, the Enhancer 2000, the Indus GT, Blue Chip Electronics's BCD/5.25, and CMD's FD-2000 and FD-4000.

Later ROM revisions fixed assorted problems, including a software bug that causes the save-and-replace command to corrupt data.

It offers MFM capability for accessing CP/M disks, improved speed, and somewhat quieter operation, but was only manufactured until Commodore got its production lines going with the 1571, the double-sided drive.

stated in 1988 that "Commodore 64s used to be a favorite with amateur and professional chefs since they could compute and cook on top of their 1500-series disk drives at the same time".

[6] A series of humorous tips in MikroBitti in 1989 said "When programming late, coffee and kebab keep nicely warm on top of the 1541.

The most common cause of the 1541's drive head knocking and subsequent misalignment is copy-protection schemes on commercial software.

[8] The main cause of the problem is that the disk drive itself does not feature any means of detecting when the read/write head reaches track zero.

A defective head-alignment part likely caused many of the reliability issues in early 1541 drives; one dealer told Compute!

[4] The drives were so unreliable that Info magazine joked, "Sometimes it seems as if one of the original design specs ... must have said 'Mean time between failure: 10 accesses.'"

Due to the alignment issues on the Alps drive mechanisms, Commodore switched suppliers to Newtronics in 1984.

Some Commodore users use 1541s as an impromptu math coprocessor by uploading math-intensive code to the drive for background processing.

[9] [10] [11] [12] [13] The 1541 uses a proprietary serialized derivative of the IEEE-488 parallel interface, found in previous disk drives for the PET/CBM range of personal and business computers,[14] but when the VIC-20 was in development, a cheaper alternative to the expensive IEEE-488 cables was sought.

To ensure a ready supply of inexpensive cabling for its home computer peripherals, Commodore chose standard DIN connectors for the serial interface.

[15] Initially, Commodore intended to use a hardware shift register (one component of the 6522) to maintain fast drive speeds with the new serial interface.

However, a hardware bug with this chip prevents the initial design from working as anticipated, and the ROM code was hastily rewritten to handle the entire operation in software.

According to Jim Butterfield, this causes a speed reduction by a factor of five;[16] had 1540 compatibility not been a requirement, the disk interface would have been much faster.

Without hardware modifications, some "fast loader" utilities (which bypassed routines in the 1541's onboard ROM) managed to achieve speeds of up to 2.5 kilobytes per second.

It is possible via low-level programming to move the drive head to tracks 36–40 and write on them, this is sometimes done by commercial software for copy protection purposes and/or to get additional data on the disk.

However, one track is reserved by DOS for directory and file allocation information (the BAM, block availability map).

Owing to the drive's non-use of the index hole, it is also possible to make "flippy floppies" by inserting the diskette upside-down and formatting the other side, and it is commonplace and normal for commercial software to be distributed on such disks.

The bitrate is the raw one between the read/write head and signal circuitry so actual useful data rate is a factor 5/4 less due to GCR encoding.