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My understanding was that the Commodore 64 basically didn't have a hard drive.  The disk drive was kind of it.  Obviously a motherboard/processor had to be somewhere.  I didn't know you could do multiple drives, or how that would work.  My friends only had the one floppy disk drive.  If you could do any kind of work or hobby that you could save on those machines, we didn't know how.  We just loaded games from a floppy, and that was basically it. 

The guy I mentioned who worked with my dad is who told me that, and I have no idea if he really knew what he was talking about.  He would've been considered a PC guru for his time, I know that much.  In an age where most people didn't have computers, and those who did could only do the most basic of tasks with them, he was doing business, tax documents, all kinds of stuff on his home PC.  Since I blamed him for us getting an IBM-compatible, I asked him what the hell.  He said the Commodore was kind of a piece of trash that didn't even have a hard drive.  Whether he was right or he was just an IBM shill, I couldn't say.  I was like 8. 

Well, no, the C64 did not have any kind of a hard drive, as most other computers did not in that era.  Even the IBM Compatible computers of the early 80's did not have a hard drive, as far as I can remember.  I don't even think any of the computers in my school had hard drives, and I graduated from HS in '94.  I remember the first time I even heard about a hard drive, it was probably in the early 90's and one of our teachers was telling us about it.  She said it had a 10 (!) megabyte hard drive, and we all ohh'd and ahhh'd.  10 megabytes?  What on earth would you ever need that much storage for?  Remember, back in those days a floppy was 520KB, or the still new "hard floppy" was 1.44 MB.  Remember, there were no digital video's, photo's, or music in the 80's and 90's.  Most games were on the order of 20-30KB.  I read recently that the original Super Mario Brothers game for NES was 32KB.  
You could save to the C64 disk if you were working on something, I think the disk drive (1541) could be paralleled together.  The disk drives actually had their own memory and processor, which is what made them so expensive.  Basically a computer feeding a computer.  They were damn loud too.  

There was a fast load cartridge you could buy (Epyx) that made the DD much faster.  Supposedly, some kind of design decision made way back to make the C64 compatible with the VIC-20 software doomed the speed of any hard drive in the future.  

We got our first PC in [I think] 1985, and there was a 10 MB hard drive in that one. 

It was actually IBM, not a clone. The IBM PC XT. 

We got our first PC in [I think] 1985, and there was a 10 MB hard drive in that one.

It was actually IBM, not a clone. The IBM PC XT.

Rich PPL ! 

All joking aside, the C64 was a $200 machine back then.  The IBM was probably over $1,000 or more.  

We got our first PC in [I think] 1985, and there was a 10 MB hard drive in that one.

It was actually IBM, not a clone. The IBM PC XT.

We got our IBM-compatible, I'd say, probably around '88 or '89.  But maybe as late as '90.  I don't have a clear association in my memory with what grade I was in, so I can't remember for sure.  As many times as I saw it boot up I should be able to remember the specs, but I'm just guessing when I say it said 256k memory, but I think that's right.  I don't know how much hard drive space.  We replaced that around '92 or '93 with a machine that had the slick, new Windows 3.1 pre-installed.  That one had 4 MB of RAM and I was hyper-impressed and couldn't imagine what could possibly use that much memory.  The hard drive was 200 MB, but my brother-in-law, who is quite a tech-nerd himself, did something he called "stacking" the hard drive, and increased its capacity to 400 MB.  To this day I have no idea what that is or what he did.  I'm not aware of any procedure to be done on a modern hard drive that can double its storage capacity.  I only know he wasn't making it up.  Without changing the hard drive, the specs it listed did double.

Unless the bastard knew some kind of way to make it say something different than what it actually was.  Which is not out of the question.  That idgit didn't even finish high school and has never read an interesting book in his life, but give him a technical manual and he eats that crap up.  He learned multiple programming languages and really learned his way around hardware, all self-taught, and eventually helped start the tech office for the Sheriff's Dept. in Baton Rouge where he'd been a cop for years.  After he left law enforcement in 2007 he's done networking and programming for municipalities and private companies......and he's completely worthless as far as learning anything from.....dude can't explain anything to save his life, and has no interest.  He also doesn't understand what I went back to school for, he heard the word "coding" and thinks I'm a programmer now.  I tried to explain to him that my coding ability is mostly limited to data retrieval, manipulation, and ML algorithms, but every time I see him now he shows me something he's working on, which just looks like The Matrix to me, and expects me to understand it.  I just smile, nod, tell him good job, and wonder why he doesn't understand I don't know what the hell I'm looking at.  And he doesn't even read any cool books.  He's the worst kind of tech-nerd.  The kind you can't can't learn from and has no other nerd aspects that make him fun to talk to.  

We got our IBM-compatible, I'd say, probably around '88 or '89.  But maybe as late as '90.  I don't have a clear association in my memory with what grade I was in, so I can't remember for sure.  As many times as I saw it boot up I should be able to remember the specs, but I'm just guessing when I say it said 256k memory, but I think that's right.  I don't know how much hard drive space.  We replaced that around '92 or '93 with a machine that had the slick, new Windows 3.1 pre-installed.  That one had 4 MB of RAM and I was hyper-impressed and couldn't imagine what could possibly use that much memory.  The hard drive was 200 MB, but my brother-in-law, who is quite a tech-nerd himself, did something he called "stacking" the hard drive, and increased its capacity to 400 MB.  To this day I have no idea what that is or what he did.  I'm not aware of any procedure to be done on a modern hard drive that can double its storage capacity.  I only know he wasn't making it up.  Without changing the hard drive, the specs it listed did double.

Wow, old memories... When you mentioned it I vaguely remembered doing something similar, and it wasn't actually doubling the space but it was compressing files to make the HDD appear larger.

Some googling brought me to the original "Stacker": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

I think when I did this, it might have been the Microsoft version, DriveSpace or DoubleSpace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace

I can imagine that this would have seemed like black magic to a non-techie 

Then our family finally bought an Apple IIc in 1984 and that's what we all used until I went off to college in 1990.

Also, your ancient ass is older than I thought you were.  Damn.....you gonna make it to next year, or what?  

Also, your ancient ass is older than I thought you were.  Damn.....you gonna make it to next year, or what? 

Again...

University of Texas Electrical Engineer 1994.

1994 was my graduation year for undergrad.  I spent 4 years in college (no 5 or 6 year plan for me, my scholarships only lasted for 4 years and anything beyond that would have been on my own dime, of which I had very few at the time).

As for your question, it's always a crap shoot at this point.