The idea is that I could replace a physical 3.5" drive with a volume on a SAN which would have some form of redundancy, more speed, and I’d be easily able to make a backup of this information if it wasn’t on a single drive that requires digging inside this printer to remove for periodic cloning.
So the real question is could I make a virtual volume accessible via SATA?
For the environment think extremely small business, Konica Minolta C220 is the device in question although my question could be applied to any sort of device that is too stupid for iSCSI
I’ve had a decent read through the C220 manual and there’s nothing about accessing storage over a network (or any way outside of a usb drive)
It has a print server inside it which handles jobs and also takes care of the 'user boxes' which are where you can scan to hard disk. These user drives can also store print jobs so they can be reprinted at any stage from the interface on the printer its self. An example of where you'd see this being used is at a car dealership where the salespeople can just print off the booklet for an individual model on the spot rather than needing them all to be printed in bulk.
We have a similar setup here where there are a number of static print jobs that need to be printed whenever necessary, by the end user who can't have access to a PC.
There's currently a 500GB 3.5" drive in the machine serving as storage for the above and I'd like to figure out a way of replacing this drive with a virtual drive. So my reckoning was that if there was a way to access a SAN by SATA it would just be a case of creating that volume and plugging it into the printers SATA port.
The current drive is rather slow and is a bit of a bottleneck as it stands, jobs are sent from a PC over the network but despite being connected at 1gbps the actual transfer is happening at less than 20MB/s* [1]
The SATA to SAN would be needed on the printer side (or rather the existing print server which is part of the c220 unit). If it would make more sense then the c220 print server could be bypassed and an actual standalone print server *[2] could be used if the userboxes and associated features that are currently in place could remain (print to userbox, scan to userbox, etc)
** To expand on points 1&2 above, I have absolutely no idea if there is a way to replace the c220s print server with something that has these features, as far as I'm concerned I don't mind staying or changing as long as the functionality stays the same from an end user point of view.
You would just go about setting up a standard print server on your chosen OS.
However, in our setup it's a University where users are only printing. We use a pretty standard CUPS (Linux) setup that allows for the linking to pre-paid accounts. So as a result I do not know if the scanning could easily be replicated using a similar method.
I am not aware of any drive lock downs, but is it possible to just replace the HDD itself for a larger one?
unfortunately the issue isn't really space its redundancy and ease of backup, there's some digging involved in removing the hard drive to back it up. I could use sata extension cables and just leave the hard disk outside the machine but I'd rather fix the issue properly and be able to automate the backup and eventually have this whole setup not need babysitting
The printing from a pc is fine as it is so there's no need for pre-paid credits etc, too. The printing to internal hard drive and scanning to that drive are all handled within the printer at the moment so that functionality would be lost by by-passing the C220's print server, which isn't really an option. The C220's print server has a web interface and can already be accessed by laptops and ipads on the network, too.
It's a bit of a strange setup which I think will require an equally strange fix.
Might have to be a raspberry pi related project if nobody has tried it before