I’m scrapping my Epson WF-3640 due to it being a piece of crap that never works. I know some printers have internal drives that can retain images of stuff I don’t want to share. I can’t seem to figure out whether mine does, though. Does anyone know, or know of a resource I can use to figure out the answer? I don’t want to call Epson customer service. My life is too short.
I don’t think it does - it will have a small flash memory for storing the configuration settings and some volatile memory for caching incoming spooled jobs and scanned documents before they are passed out to a computer. It’s too cheap a unit to have a hard drive in it.
There’s no evidence that this unit has an internal drive, and FWIW, the only printers I’ve ever herad of having them are large, office-sized workhorses, not consumer printers.
That’s what I figured, but thought I would see if I can be sure. I know I’ve printed and scanned financial documents that could cause a headache if the Russians got them. Did I say Russians? Never mind the Russians.
I work in corporate IT. It is true that large printers/copiers/scanners have hard drives that can store a scandalous amount of data but small personal printers like you describe generally don’t.
There is virtually no risk in this case but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still have some fun being paranoid. Smash it with a sledgehammer, shoot it, blow it up or whatever else suits your fancy. It is never good to just let a failing electronic device get away without exacting sweet revenge for all of its failings.