[wkat4242]

Not sure about the commodore but atari's floppy drive was connected via a 19200 bps serial connection so even for those days it was really slow.

Both atari 8 bit and commodore had a disk drive with a trimmed down 6502 in it so you basically bought a second computer. This is why the drives cost more than the computer itself.

[dole]

The Commodore serial bus ran at 3200bps, the 1541 disk drive maxed out around 400bps stock.

[wkat4242]

Wow that's hardly faster than the tape recorder :O

So the atari was relatively fast! I never knew. I didn't have the disk drive until I was much older.