Save to HD size question ?

[fishleg]

Had one today where accessing files on the harddrive caused the machine to crash but it is used constantly for printing from a user box so print jobs are stored then printed all the time from the machine directly to save time.

What I want to know say if I have a pdf 2.5 megs big and this is stored in a user box on the machine obviously it must be uncompressed so the machine can read it but what I have trouble understanding is how big do standard documents become.

Does the machine turn a job to dots then print ? I want to visualise in my head what actually happens when the machine receives a print job is it converted to a much bigger file ?

What I was trying to fathom was if the user was storing multipage image files that are compressed pdf's on the computer but are stored as print jobs in the user box could this massively overfill the 20 gig harddrive of the machine ? 50 x uncompressed pdf's on the machine cause it to crash ?

The machine was a c352 btw.

Cheers for any help,
Fishy

[Stirton.M]

To date, I have not encountered any issues related to file limits when scanning or printing documents to a user/system box. A user box is available as an option to side step email file size limits found on many email servers. In the case of scanning, you can select compact PDF or tif or jpg if you want. But printing to the box doesn't give this option.

Information stored on the drive is generally stored using compression. File size is highly dependent on far too many factors for there to be a single rule of thumb on file size. What is the coverage percentage on any given page (how much white space is covered)? Is it in colour? What is the DPI count, 200-600 DPI? Is it a Tiff, JPG or PDF or Compact PDF? How many pages total is the document? The only way to know for sure is to experiment with the different settings, scanning an assortment of documents in and then downloading those files to a PC via the web interface or page scope box operator and then seeing what those file sizes are. For example, a generic black and white page at 200 DPI may scan in at 20K, but if you scan that file in at 600DPI and change it to full colour, that page might expand to 1 megabyte or more. If you use compact PDF, you are limited on the max DPI and forced to full colour, but the file will still be small, 200K for example. JPEG vs Tiff, there are file size differences.

I never say you will never fill up a 20G drive...but you will certainly have a tough time trying to fill that drive. It could take a lot of scanning before you theoretically start runing into problems. Printing files to the user box, you can determine the size stored via observing the print queue in the driver as you send the job to the printer.

As for the crashes, what is the machine exibiting when you attempt to access the file via printing it or saving to a PC via web interface? Crash is misleading, not to mention meaningless to me.

Some possible causes that might be giving you issue, are typical problems found with any hard drive on any computer.

Eventually the drive will start to physically wear out from general use. This can introduce write errors that can manifest into access errors later on. Electromagnetic wear can change a binary bit from 1 to 0 or vice versa and so on. Bearings that can introduce platter wobble. Physical surface damage on the platter.

Fragmentation issues can also introduce problems. Slower file access times, random errors while accessing, even lockups. For example, I can add 3 files, each 20 MB in size. File two I delete. I add another 40 MB file. Part of that will take up the space the second file used to be, the rest taking up space after file 3. Then I delete file 3 and add a new 5 meg file, and then a 10 meg file and then delete file one, to add a 60 Meg file right after that. Pieces of the 60 meg file will reside in the first 20 meg space, and 5 megs of that file will take up the 5 megs left open where file 3 used to be and the rest will take up space after the 40 MB file. Sounds complicated and convoluted right? This is what file fragmentation is. And this goes on constantly on any hard drive in any computer. There is no difference in a copier hard disk, with one exception. There is no way to defragment the drive on a copier, unlike a PC where the OS like Win7 can do this on the fly. Over time, this can greatly slow down the access of a file and the potential for read/write errors increases as the fragmentation increases. Eventually, if you do not do anything about the fragmentation, it can get severe enough to prevent you from accessing a file all together, or even crash an OS like WinXP.

It is possible in your case that you may need to do some hard disk house cleaning.

Download all the files from all user boxes to a PC, using Pagescope Box Operator or the web interface. Also, backup the scan one touches (the buttons for scan to PC, Email and Faxes) via export while logged in as administrator. Pagescope Data Administrator can also be used here. Then, in tech rep mode, simply format the hard disk using logical format (do not use physical format, it takes forever to complete). After this, you will need to recreate the user boxes, and import the one touches. Then from there, you can print all the files you downloaded from the user boxes to the PC back to those user boxes, using the "print to user box" toggle in the printer driver.

Eventually you may need to do this again.

Also, since the hard disks in these machines are laptop drives (2.5 inch), they will almost certainly fail a lot sooner than a 3.5 disk would. If your disk is only 20 Gig, and you are experiencing problems, this is likely the case. Backup as I previously mentioned, replace the drive with a new drive (IDE, not SATA), format (using logical format) and return the files back to the drive as previously explained.

[fishleg]

Thank you for going to the bother of going through everything like that has really made it much more clearer to me. I didn't realise the copier could come fragmented and it would sorta fit with how its used.

From what you have said though it would look like the drive is suffering from either fragmentation and is taking longer to read said files or isn't reading them properly. I will definitely experiment with the next one I come across in the work shop with printing and storing different format and types of file as there seems no other way to work it out easily.

Its an estate agent and basically every house they do is in word format and I think the pictures are pretty much just dropped in straight off a digital camera so the resolution of the pictures will be pretty hefty but in general the files where around 8-10 megs each. As it takes the copier a long time to spool these docs they are sent to the copiers user box then printed over and over when needed from the copier directly since this saves them time and allows the brochure to be printed instantly.

The problem was they would go over to the copier to retrieve a file so press user box, go into there box, select a file to be printed then the screen would just go blank and the copier becomes unresponsive until its turned off and on. The really weird thing is it wasnt always the same file if they tried to print that file again after restarting it would mysteriously work or other times it would cause it to crash. Hope that makes it a little more clearer.

So if you print say a 10 meg word document at 600 dpi say if you had an inserted image in word that was 1200 dpi does the driver look at the picture and resize it before it goes to the copier ? so in essence the file would not need all that detail so would not be as big on the copier/print spool ?

If you had a compressed pdf with pictures regardless of the picture size say 200 dpi and you print that at 600 dpi would the driver blow that up so it would take up much more space on the hd and if printed would take much longer to spool ?

What I'm still struggling with is no matter what the file size on the computer jpeg word pdf etc when its sent to the printer it will still need to uncompressed right so its in the printers native format and if its stored in dots surely unless its got lots of white space it will be huge ? As the copier I bet only has the ability to write pdf, jpeg and not to read.

Thanks again for any help,
Fishy

[Stirton.M]

Ok...in print jobs, when any document is sent to the printer, usually the job itself is parsed directly, and the print engine within the copier will process the information, decompress and format the data all on the fly. Print jobs sent to the box are left as is, without any formatting. Only when they are printed from the box, will they go through the processing.

I try my best to educate users who try to print information to properly format that information before they send it. My 10MP camera can spit out compressed jpgs at about 300k, but when I print those to our boxes, they explode in the print parse to several megs. So I have been in the habit of using picture editing (part of Office) and resizing the image down to 640x480 and printing them that way. Word if I recall, can do this internally. Acrobat cannot. The images need to be formatted for printing before they are dropped into the document.

Also, if the end user is printing PDFs, try to get them to use the advanced operation of "print as image". Bring up the print dialog in reader, bottom left corner of the window will have a button "Advanced", click on there and toggle the "print as image". The information will be flattened at the computer side and all elements on the page will become a single bmp and sent to the printer that way.

Unfortunately this is not available in other applications.