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.