TITLE
    LaserWriter IINTX: Space Amounts for an Attached Hard Drive
Article ID:
Author:
Created:
Modified: 		4396

9/22/89
9/22/89
TOPIC

DISCUSSION



    TOPIC ---------------------------------------------

    This is a request for basic information about hard drives that are attached to
    the LaserWriter IINTX. Specifically, I would like additional information on
    the following issues.

    1) How can a person determine how much space is available on the drive? Let's
    say I have 60 fonts downloaded to the drive and would like to
    check available space to determine how many additional fonts I can
    download. The "diskstatus" operator tells how many Kbytes are
    available, but what about the ratio of cache versus font storage? Is it
    with the "userdiskpercent" operator?

    2) At what point does the system/printer alert me that the space
    available on the drive will limit performance? Does it depend on the
    ratio of font caching space versus font storage space, or an actual
    total MB value of space that's available?

    3) What affect does the amount of free space have on the performance of the
    LaserWriter speed?

    DISCUSSION ---------------------------------------------

    The following information was obtained from the LaserWriter Reference
    Manual from Addison-Wesley (ISBN 0-201-19258-6), Chapter 2 "Working With
    Fonts", and the LaserWriter IINT/NTX Manual from Apple (030-3215-A),
    Appendix A "LaserWriter II Upgrades".

    1) Initialization of a hard disk attached to a LaserWriter IINTX allocates
    20% of the disk space to font storage and 80% to font caching. The
    LaserWriter Font Utility informs the user how much space is available
    for additional font storage. The "diskstatus" operator returns the
    number of pages currently available and the maximum number of pages
    available (a page being 1024 characters). The operator
    "userdiskpercent" returns the percentage of disk space allocated for
    user files. The operator "setuserdiskpercent" allows setting the
    percentage of space on the drive allotted for user files. This operator
    also removes the least recently used cached bitmaps from the disk file
    system until there is enough free space.

    2) The Font Utility application issues the warning to the user when the
    storage percentage is high enough to threaten font caching performance.
    Since the LaserWriter IINTX automatically increases the storage
    percentage as needed, this warning is probably related to the number of
    fonts on the disk versus the amount of cache space left on the disk.

    3) As long as there is enough font cache space to create the needed bitmaps
    for the downloaded fonts on the hard disk, there should be no decrease
    in throughput of the LaserWriter as available space on the hard disk
    gets smaller. The warning from the Font Utility should be adequate.


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