Print server?

[Josh]

I want a magical device that will allow me to simultaneously print at full speed across up to four printers from a single computer. I read the wiki for a print server, I don't really know if this is what I need. Do you?

[DArque Bishop]

Uh, probably not. Granted, this doesn't mean that much, but I've never heard of a device that does quite that. What a print server does is make a printer (or multiple printers) available over the network to multiple machines. I have a D-Link print server at home that allows all of the computers at my house print to any of the three printers on it (two parallel, one USB).

[torgo]

Your typical consumer printer has very little memory or processing power and relies on the computer to do the real work. If you want to offload the printing to the printer and let the PC remain free, then you need a printer that has enough memory to store the entire document locally and typically has a hardware postscript driver built right in. I haven't dealt with printers like that in a long time, but they used to cost an f'ing fortune. They're probably not as expensive today.

As for the print server, Darque pretty much nailed it. A lot of printers nowadays have an ethernet port and you can just plug them into a router on your network and boom, instant networked printer.

[Rtificial]

My mom bought some sorta lynksys device that allows you to make a wireless printer network in your house/office. She didn't even need it since I setup a router in her house so she could print shit from her laptop and have the router do the same thing.

I think with that device you could hook the printer up to the device and then have everyone else connected to it wirelessly and be able to print.

[Josh]

I have four of those big fucking xerox networkable printers with the memory and shit. They rule. those aren't the problem. I have five older Primera printers that connect through a printer port. I'm trying to scale down my workspace so I'm not using five fucking computers.

I would be doing all day print jobs on no less than three of these printers at once, can i build a PC with super sex print capabilities to spool data out like that to multiple printers with no slowing down?

I really don't know what I'm talking about, if anyone has any ideas at all please chime in.

[torgo]

I doubt it. There's a lot of bottlenecks there. The limit of your network's speed if you network them, or the limit of the printer port if you hook them directly to a computer, and the limit of your PC's ability to send the data to the printer. If you're printing big ass files then you'll hit a bottleneck somewhere almost for sure.

If you really want fast throughput then put them on a gigabit network or hook them up to a badass PC via firewire or something like that.

[GohanX]

It sounds to me that the best thing you are going to be able to do is to have them all networked, just keep in mind that network printers tend to be slow as shit if you are sending large files. For small files, it's no biggie, but send a 600 DPI Photoshop document and you might be waiting a while. Not a whole lot you can do other than make sure you are using the fastest networking equipment available.

[Opaque]

Belkin makes a networked USB hub. Get that.

It costs about $120 but you can hook up 5 printers on it, as opposed to 1 with most other print servers running the same cost. Also, since it supplements USB instead of actually "print serving" it works with all printers, which is a big step up from Linksys' 50%.

[Josh]

the five printers I am trying to hook up connect through the printer port. No usb.

also: always 300dpi tif files. 20 megs and up.

[Dyne]

We'd need to know a little more about the print jobs and the printers themselves to come up with the best solution. Do the printers have enough RAM to store the entire print job, or does the job need to be spooled to the printer by a computer? Does he want to send the jobs directly to the printers from his workstation, or is a network print server (a PC, not just a print server device) an acceptable option?

If he could manage to get all of the printers connected to his workstation, he could just plug 'em in and go. There would be a performance penalty if the printers don't have enough memory to take the whole print job, though, since the workstation would need to keep the jobs in RAM and spool 'em off as printer memory becomes available. And it might be a tad tricky coming up with the right connectivity since PC's typically have zero or one parallel ports. You could use PCI-to-parallel cards or possibly USB-to-parallel adapters to add additional parallel ports. An easier option would be to use print server devices -- connect each printer to a network and send jobs directly to each printer via its print server device.

Another option that may be particularly helpful if the print jobs are too large for the printers' memory is to move the print burden from your friend's workstation to another computer that acts as a dedicated print server. The workstation sends the whole whopper of a print job to the other computer, which can spool it off little by little to the printer(s). Instead of one computer for each printer, you're down to two computers for all five printers.

Here's a sketch of one possible solution:


Another neat thing you could do with a print server is "printer pooling". From his workstation, your friend would see one printer hosted by the print server. Print to it and the print server would determine which of the printers in the pool is available and send the print job there.



so it sounds to me you can either
a. have printers with enough ram to hold the jobs
or
b. spool pieces of the jobs from multiple pc's (it can be done with just two)