"When
programming late,
coffee and
kebab keep nicely warm on top of 1541." (a
tip from
MikroBITTI 5/1989).
1541 was a really really cool disk drive, but same cannot be said in the literal sense. In Finland, it was known as "toaster". The internal power source was main source of that heat. The newer 1541-II model was for l8mrz, because it kept a lot less noise and it had an external power source. Real Hackers used the good ol' 1541.
But on the good side, 1541 was a really really smart disk drive. It had a 6502 CPU of its own, and even 2 kilobytes of RAM! So, Commodore 64 could multitask, at least with disk operations.
Personally, I haven't seen or heard the music stuff and other deep magic mentioned, but I do remember one program from C=-lehti: 1541's red LED (the "busy" LED) was not simply an on/off thing, it had 256 states. The program in the magazine blinked the led once very slowly. Übercool.