In reply to this comment by TheGenk:
Why does a photocopier even need a harddrive? Why don't they use just a small amount of cheap volatile memory?

Copiers cannot depend solely on volatile memory alone because the file size of scanned documents can easily exceed the size of affordable RAM solutions. This is especially true when you need to keep an entire document stored in memory (such as when you wanted to print multiple copies of the document in page-order).

In the 'old' days, when copiers didn't use harddrives they were unable keep copied sets in order, they would scan one page, make 10 copies, then scan the next page and then 10 more copies, etc. Then the operator would have to collate all the pages of the sets into the correct order. This was extremely tedious!

The use of harddrives removes that old limitation and allows for very large documents to be scanned and collated.

In reply to this comment by TheGenk:
Why does a photocopier even need a harddrive? Why don't they use just a small amount of cheap volatile memory?

Copiers cannot depend solely on volatile memory alone because the file size of scanned documents can easily exceed the size of affordable RAM solutions. This is especially true when you need to keep an entire document stored in memory (such as when you wanted to print multiple copies of the document in page-order).

In the 'old' days, when copiers didn't use harddrives they were unable keep copied sets in order, they would scan one page, make 10 copies, then scan the next page and then 10 more copies, etc. Then the operator would have to collate all the pages of the sets into the correct order. This was extremely tedious!

The use of harddrives removes that old limitation and allows for very large documents to be scanned and collated.