Server versus USB

B

Bill W

I also posted the following on the hardware site, but I don't know which
forum is more appropriate. I will post here because I think it's more a
general, subjective topic of discussion.

I have a 7200 external disk drive and a laser printer. They are both
connected to one PC via USB2 on a home network. They are shared with a
second PC through a wired router. I would like to attach both devices to my
network through a simple printer/storage server that attaches directly to my
home network router. Will I see any change in performance? Currently the
host computer accesses the printer and disk drive directly through it's USB
ports. The second PC must go through the router and through the host
computer to access both devices. I'm hoping that nether PC will see a
reduction in performance. Thank you for your help. I would hate to go
through all the effort of setting up the server only to find that I've
compromised the outstanding performance I'm currently experiencing. Both
computers are running XP.
 
D

DL

I can only say that I have no problems with an HP inkjet connected to a
wired/wireless print server router ( Netgear),
three PC's accessing the router. (two wired, one wireless)
1) Not all print servers will work with all printers - you should check with
the print router manu
2) Various printer utilities might not function (generally those that report
on status of the printer consumables)
3) Not all printers are network capable
 
P

Paul Johnson

Bill said:
I also posted the following on the hardware site, but I don't know which
forum is more appropriate. I will post here because I think it's more a
general, subjective topic of discussion.

I have a 7200 external disk drive and a laser printer. They are both
connected to one PC via USB2 on a home network. They are shared with a
second PC through a wired router. I would like to attach both devices to
my network through a simple printer/storage server that attaches directly
to my
home network router. Will I see any change in performance?

It depends largely on the operating system you plan on using as a server.
Assuming you're using identical hardware on both machines, if you plan on
using Windows, don't expect a noticable difference. If you plan on using
Linux, expect comparable printer performance and vastly superior disk IO,
esp. when mounting or writing to USB disks. The more RAM you throw at it,
the better the performance you're going to get to a certain degree (more
room to cache recently accessed data).
 

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