Last Updated on October 5, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
In 1992, the Commodore 64 was fading. You may be surprised to hear it was still the number three gaming computer in terms of market share in the United States, but its growth years were in the distant past. That year, a new third party disk drive appeared or the C-64. Sometimes when you do something for the last time, you don’t realize it will be the last. In this case, I think everyone knew these drives were the end of the line. But what a finale they were.
The C-64’s place in the world, circa 1992
The C-64 was not a priority for Commodore in 1992. Whatever future Commodore had was with the AGA-generation Amiga. AGA was Commodore’s effort to modernize the Amiga to make it more competitive with the typical PC of 1992. One of the things they wanted to do was update the machine to use high density disk drives. But using a standard high density drive intended for a PC in an Amiga wasn’t just a matter of plugging one in. Commodore had to use a specially made drive that spun high density disks at half speed, 150 RPM, to get high density in an Amiga. That’s because the disk controller was built into the sound chip, which Commodore didn’t update as part of the hardware refresh.
What does any of that have to do with the Commodore 64? While Commodore was figuring out its best option for putting a high density drive in an Amiga, CMD was working on connecting a regular commodity PC floppy mechanism to the C-64.
Taking it a step further with the CMD FD-4000
And then CMD went a step further and made the CMD FD-4000. The FD-4000 used extended density disks, the type you rarely saw even on a PC.
I won’t say extended density floppies were more popular on the 64 then they were on the PC, because they weren’t popular on either platform. But if you really wanted that capacity, you could indeed get an extended density drive for your Commodore 64, and its 3.2 MB formatted capacity was an extremely large amount of removable storage in the Commodore world. If you were going to stick with Commodore, that drive was a tempting proposition. The cost of the drive and a box of extended density disks may very well have had a lower cost per megabyte than a 20 MB hard drive for a C-64, and even if it didn’t, you didn’t have to buy the drive and the disks all at once.
The CMD FD-2000 had 6,336 blocks free on a freshly Commodore-formatted disk. The FD-4000 had 12,736 blocks free. That compares with 3,128 blocks free on a Commodore 1581 or 4,133 blocks free on an SFD-1001. The 1541 lagged way behind with 664 blocks free.
The power user’s drive
CMD’s FD-2000 and 4000 drives had a bunch of nice amenities included. Unlike other Commodore IEC drives, which could only have their device number set up to 11 with DIP switches, the switches on the back of CMD drives could go up to device 15 like an SFD-1001 or other older Commodore IEEE drives. So you could connect 8 floppies to your 64, if you could afford four CMD drives.
There was also a push button on the front of the drive to switch the device number on the fly. It would switch the device number between 8, 9, and whatever number you set on the back of the drive. So you could add a CMD drive to a dual-drive setup and easily run whatever combination of drives you wanted with just a couple of button presses, without messing with DIP switches.
Of course the CMD drive came along so late in the C-64’s life that very little software was going to support it directly. But CMD gave it the ability to emulate the 1541, 1571, and 1581 and divide a high capacity disk into several partitions sized to those earlier drives. This allowed earlier software to take advantage of the drive. It wasn’t as good as full native support would be, but it still made the drive useful.
And for unprotected software that didn’t do anything fancy, you could use the drive’s native mode that extended Commodore DOS to include subdirectories. That’s something Commodore never got around to implementing.
Critical acclaim for the CMD FD-2000 and 4000
The Commodore magazine scene was in pretty rough shape in 1992. The only review of the drive I remember seeing was in the very last issue of Run magazine. But it was a very positive review. The only fault they found with the drive was the color scheme. The drive had a black case and usually had a white drive mechanism in it, although their review unit had a black drive mechanism. They said it looks more at home in an audio rack than on a computer desk. I will observe that it would have looked phenomenal with a Commodore Plus/4 or 16.
I think a white or cream color would have clashed less with a 64C or 128, but that’s just me. Maybe CMD wanted the drive to stand out and make a statement.
Rarity and longevity of the CMD FD-2000 and 4000
Commodore went out of business in 1994, and in 1993, its final full year of sales, the C-64 went out with a whimper, not a bang. Most of the sales weren’t new units, but rather, refurbished units. With its service center network dwindling, Commodore ran a promotion for the last two or three years of its existence. Mail Commodore a broken 64 and $64, and they would send you a refurbished unit. This kept a study supply of units to refurbish coming in.
After Commodore went under, CMD picked up the torch and carried it, amazingly, into the 21st century, closing its doors in 2003. CMD refurbished and sold Commodore equipment basically until the end, alongside their own products.
And there was an audience left for them. I remember someone telling me circa 1996 or possibly even later, that there was still an active Commodore users group in St Louis. I’d let my membership lapse way back in 1991.
But there’s no doubt both the CMD FD-2000 and CMD FD-4000 sold fewer units than a Commodore 1581, which we can estimate sold around 60,000 units. The CMD FD-2000 and 4000 cost $220 and $300, respectively. A refurbished 1581 cost closer to $110 at the time.
My encounter with a CMD customer in 1985
I was working at Best Buy, selling 486s and Pentiums. A guy who looked like he was in his mid 50s came in and told me he was thinking about possibly replacing his Commodore 64. But he warned me he had lots of upgrades connected to it and he didn’t want to buy something less powerful than what he already had.
I found this curious, and I asked him if he was aware that Commodore had been out of business for more than a year. He said he was aware of that, but they had to continue making parts for 7 years. It’s the law. And his tone made it clear he wasn’t going to let someone less than half his age tell him any different, so I didn’t press the issue. That’s not how that law works, but that’s not important.
Trying to sell a PC to a CMD customer
The conversation didn’t get any better for the 15 minutes or so that he was there. I showed him 66 MHz 486s and even showed him a 90 MHz Pentium, but he was unimpressed. They were running Windows 3.1, which he turned his nose up at and said he didn’t like it. Windows 95 wasn’t out yet. I said Windows was conceptually similar to GEOS on his 64. He said he didn’t like GEOS either. So I dropped one of the machines to DOS and showed him whatever pre-installed software it had that ran under DOS. He didn’t like that either.
Pointing at the six aisles of software we had for PCs also didn’t impress him.
He left without buying anything. When you’re ready, you’re ready. And he wasn’t ready.
I’m sure he made a trip to a computer store once a year or so to check in on the scene and bought something else eventually. But 1995 wasn’t the year. There must have been holdouts like him in other cities. I know of others who did buy newer computers, but kept a Commodore set up as a secondary machine for several years. That’s what we had done.
The CMD FD-2000 after CMD
After CMD closed up shop, they licensed the technology to someone named Maurice Randall who manufactured derivative devices and sold them himself in small quantities. I don’t have any insider information on Randall, but at some point he went unresponsive and the modern Commodore community doesn’t hold him in the highest regard.
A modern clone of the CMD FD 2000 called the Rear Admiral was available from CommanderKang in more recent years.
In 2024, YouTuber 8-bit Resurgence revealed he had reverse engineered the CMD FD 2000. He had also reverse engineered the 1581, and had reproduction boards produced so it is possible to build a 1581 using his board, a 3D printed case, and a PC floppy drive. The CMD FD 2000 and 4000 are not terribly different conceptually from a 1581, so it’s not surprising he was able to reverse engineer that drive as well. Crucially, the I/O chip in the 1581 what out of production in 1993 or 1994, but CMD had opted to use an older, less expensive 6522 chip available from second sources and is still available today. So a replica FD2000 might actually be easier to source parts for then a 1581.
At any rate, a link to his page is here. It’s not an affiliate link, I just want to support his efforts.
How CMD did it
How was CMD able to get drive mechanisms to work with a Commodore 64 that could not be made to work with an Amiga? The answer is the design of drives for the C-64.
There is a whole computer inside that case sitting between the drive and the C-64. So as long as CMD could build a computer that could interface with the drive on one side and on the Commodore IEC bus on the other, they could connect whatever they wanted to it. So that’s what they did. They had to put a 2 MHz processor in to keep up with the high density drive, and a 4 MHz processor to keep up with the extended density drive. But other than changing the processor, clock crystal, and changing the drive controller, the two drives are identical internally. CMD was even able to build one board and populate the same board for either drive by swapping exactly two chips.
It was the successor to the 1581 the Commodore never built. But considering about 2 years earlier, CMD had found a way to interface a SCSI hard drive to the Commodore IEC bus, interfacing a commodity high density or extended density floppy drive seemed less challenging than that.
CMD’s other products
CMD did a lot of amazing stuff. They started out as a maker of a fast load product, but over time expanded into other hardware, including hard drives, floppy drives, a 4 MHz accelerator, and a RAM expansion product that could be expanded to 16 MB. It even had a battery backup so you can turn it into the world’s largest persistent RAM disk.
I really liked what CMD was doing but I admired from afar. For the cost of two or three of their products to extend a C-64 or 128’s life expectancy, you could buy a PC or an Amiga. The question is whether buying a PC or an Amiga would have been the better decision, but any PC I would have bought in 1991 would have needed to be replaced by the time I bought my 486 to replace the Amiga. I think having lived the Amiga experience was worth it.
But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wonder about that CMD experience.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.