Last night I was inspired (don't ask me why) to photograph my 1581 drive. I really like how it turned out so I wanted to share it here.
I jokingly told folks that I considered it the "Lamborghini" of Commodore drives. The reason being because it's gorgeous, it's expensive, it's fast and yet it's not very practical. I say this because it isn't entirely backwards compatible to the 1541 like the 1571 was, thus it was often used more for archiving or used on BBSes that needed more storage. But... you know you want one.
Since then, however, I've learned a few things I'm looking forward to experimenting with soon.
First, IDE64 fixed versions of software will run nicely on the 1581 (didn't know that), and I've now gone and found quite an impressive list of some of those games. My experience was to load collections of games onto 1581 disks and try, one at a time, to see which ones worked. Like, Jumpman or Montezuma's Revenge, for example, work perfectly iirc. But most would lock up because the 1581, per Wikipedia, "cannot utilize software that performs low-level disk access (as the vast majority of Commodore 64 games do)."
Also the designer of the 1581 is a bit of a mystery. However I discovered via a post on Quora by Dave Haynie that Herb Mosteller designed the C128, 1571, Amiga 500, 3000 and several other pieces of hardware. So it seems quite possible he also designed the case for the 1581. But, that piece of information I haven't actually verified. Along the way I also collected the name of Howard Stolz as the designer of the glorious Amiga 1000.