Well, it was slower due to a hardware problem. Basically, the hardware serial device had a bug which required a bit bang comms channel to the disk drive. Doing that amidst the sometimes aggressive video DMA is what caused all the slowdowns.
Back in the day I owned machines that did it both ways, but not a C64. My Atari computer also had a smart disk drive. Worked over something Atari called SIO, which is an early ancestor of modern USB. Back then, the Atari machine was device independent and that turned out to be great engineering!
Today we have Fuji Net devices that basically put Atari and other computers on the Internet, even to the point of being able to write BASIC programs that do meaningful things online.
The C64 approach was not much different, working via RS-232. But for a bug, it would have performed nicely.
Now, my other machine was an Apple ][, and that disk was all software. And it was fast! And being all software meant people did all sorts of crazy stuff on those disk drives ranging from more capacity to crazy copy protection.
But... That machine could do nothing else during disk access.
The Atari and C64 machines could do stuff and access their disks.
Today, that Fuji Net device works via the SIO on the Atari, with the Internet being the N: device! On the Apple, it works via the SmartPort, which worked with disk drives that contained? Wait for it!!
A CPU :)
Seriously, your point is valid. But, it's not really valid in the sense you intended.
Too late for me to edit, but yes I did confuse the source of the bug. Please clarify the C64 drive scenario source of slowness. Was it VIC-20 backward compatibility, or?
In any case, I maintain the engineering wasn't at fault, having a CPU etc. Fastloaders showed it to be just poor software, and that's a point I did not make clear enough.
Commodore wanted new C64 drives to be backward compatible with VIC-20 and vice versa. They failed the second goal, and C64 sold ~10x the number of units VIC-20 did making whole exercise pointless.
All to sell more outdated garbage chips made by MOS instead of using proper FDC controller on CPU bus with cheap standard floppy.
Back in the day I owned machines that did it both ways, but not a C64. My Atari computer also had a smart disk drive. Worked over something Atari called SIO, which is an early ancestor of modern USB. Back then, the Atari machine was device independent and that turned out to be great engineering!
Today we have Fuji Net devices that basically put Atari and other computers on the Internet, even to the point of being able to write BASIC programs that do meaningful things online.
The C64 approach was not much different, working via RS-232. But for a bug, it would have performed nicely.
Now, my other machine was an Apple ][, and that disk was all software. And it was fast! And being all software meant people did all sorts of crazy stuff on those disk drives ranging from more capacity to crazy copy protection.
But... That machine could do nothing else during disk access.
The Atari and C64 machines could do stuff and access their disks.
Today, that Fuji Net device works via the SIO on the Atari, with the Internet being the N: device! On the Apple, it works via the SmartPort, which worked with disk drives that contained? Wait for it!!
A CPU :)
Seriously, your point is valid. But, it's not really valid in the sense you intended.