What's the purpose of the HP JetDirect EIO drive J6073G?

steppinthrax · ‎03-04-2019

I'm curious what's the general purpose of adding a physial hard drive to a printer? The only thing I understand is it's for storing print jobs and later printing them? Does this device improve the performance of the printer by making it print faster? How does this differ from the printer RAM?

SHThompson · ‎03-15-2019

It does not make things any faster.

It has a lot more storage than RAM.

Documents stored on a Hard Drive are not lost if the machine is powered off.

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Hugh_Hood · ‎03-15-2019

In addition to storing print jobs and providing faster printing of complex documents, EIO hard drives also allow permanent storage of both PostScript Fonts and TrueType and Bitmapped PCL fonts, and also storage of PCL macros.

Although mosts users printing from Windows 10 applications and using the standard print driver won't take advantage of the storage of fonts and PCL macros, certain users do still use those things, particularly with customized special-purpose software.

HP's Web JetAdmin is the software most users select to store and manage fonts and macros on an EIO hard drive 'device'.

SHThompson · ‎03-18-2019

I think the only time an average user will notice that a printer has a hard drive installed is when it fails and the printer doesn't initialize.

I had one time where I installed an EIO drive because the CEO of the company was printing to a machine and wanted to collate and it didn't do it properly.

A year or so later that drive failed and the printer stopped working so I removed it and in between the CEO had upgraded to a newer operating system and he never noticed the drive was gone.

Your 4350dtn has 80 megabytes of memory from the factory which is more than the average monochrome printer and I suspect if you install an eio hard drive you won't notice a difference unless you really do some unusually complex or heavy printing.

If you are really curious just pick up an EIO hard drive from eBay and install it and see what happens. It does not have to be that exact model.

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