USB expansion PCI card causing problems with 9 printers!

[DanGent]

My friend runs his own CD duplicating business and to print onto the CDs he has 9 CD printers. 3 x Epson R285. 6 x R265
Originally he had 3 of each all connected to his front panel and rear USB and it worked fine. In order to connect the 3 new R265s he bought a PCI expansion card:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Scan-...patible-Hi-End

This worked but was a bit troublesome, it kept giving various errors. He tested the PCI expansion card by plugging in his external CD Drive and it could only burn at 2x.

When he had all 9 printers plugged in he changed one from being plugged in to the expansion card and connected it to the rear mobo USB and the power cut out. Since then he's had various problems with the printers and wants me to format his PC and install everything from scratch. He's tried reinstalling the printers, I can give a detailed list of the problems if needed.

He's got a custom built PC with he thinks a Tagan PSU thats 400W. So it shouldn't be a power thing as USB doesn't draw much does it? 5V? His mobo is a Abit IC7G. Can get any more info thats needed.

. Basically I'm hoping you guys of much knowledge can help me out with these questions:

- Do PCI expansion cards work as well as onboard USB? Should he have got a branded card e.g. http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Belki...rd-(F5U220VEA1)
- Is this the best setup for using this many printers? Should he have a 2nd PC with 4 of them plugged in or even something fancy like a print server? (not sure how they would accomodate 9 printers!)

Any tips or suggestions would be really needed!

Thanks for reading,
Dan Gent

[burble]

Power shouldn't be an issue, with the printers being externally powered they'd have negligable power draw through the USB bus.

Some PCI USB cards are better than others that's for sure.

A print server would possibly not help much since USB print servers can be a bit problematic. I'd be inclined to try either a different USB card or a USB hub connected to the onboard USB ports.

[DanGent]

Would a USB hub be OK for this? My thinking was that with the bandwidth of PCI each USB port on the PCI card would be operating at full speed, where as with a hub each port on the USB hub would be limited by the single USB connection they all connect to.
This is without me looking at any figures of peak bandwidth of USB2 compared to PCI (which is pretty old anyway).

Is 9 printers a ridiculous amount to have in terms of typical use or does that kind of thing happen fairly frequently?

Thanks for the reply burble, much appreciated

[burble]

9 printers does seem a bit OTT but there's no technical reason why it shouldn't work.

A hub should be fine, you'd have 480Mb/s between the USB bus and the hub then a share of 480Mbit between each printer connected to the hub. Unless you're sending mahoosive print jobs then bandwidth won't be an issue. A 33Mhz PCI port would give upto 133MB/s, so no issues there.

[DanGent]

Yes I would have thought that printers don't require much bandwidth and therefore wouldn't be much of a problem plugging loads in. I'll have to find more information off my friend on exactly what strange stuff was happening with all these routers plugged into one PCI card. And as for the computer freezing when he moved one printer's USB connection from the card to the mobo....... maybe just see if it happens again ;^)