A degraded drum unit can cause streaks, smudges, and blank spots on your printed page even if you just inserted a new printer toner. While a broken drum unit won’t break your printer, it will just fail to stop printing at a certain point.

Over time, the drum unit deteriorates and eventually needs to be replaced. Drum units typically last for 10,000 to 50,000 printed pages, depending on the quality of the printer and unit. Your printer will exhibit warning signs of the drum unit’s deterioration so you can replace it before it stops working.

The Brother machine will display a ‘Replace Drum’ or ‘Drum Stop’ message when the machine has printed approximately 15,000 pages. The drums should be replaced as a set in order to maintain print quality. Unlike the toner cartridges, the drum change is not automatically detected by the machine when they are replaced.

A drum unit is a green metal cylinder or tube that carries a static electrical charge that attracts the toner powder from the toner cartridge and applies it to the paper as it passes through the printer. Therefore, you will always find that drum unit is located very close to or even attached to the toner cartridge.

You can view your current drum’s remaining life on your Brother machine’s LCD by following these steps.

1. Press MENU and choose Machine Info. => Drum Life.
2. Press the OK key. Your Brother machine’s LCD will display the percentage of remaining drum life.
3. Press the STOP/EXIT key.

The most obvious is most common on laser color printers and can be detected by a flashing message on the printer display screen. Other signs of a bad printer drum include printing blank pages, printing gray pages and strange sounds coming from the printer as it prints.

What’s the difference between a drum unit and toner cartridge? The toner cartridge is the container that holds the toner powder. The drum unit is an electrically charged cylinder that fuses that toner powder onto paper to create text and images. Both of these components are essential for producing a print.

The drum unit may need replacing if you notice the printer producing blurry, low-quality images. Black or colored toner spots on printouts also indicates a failing drum unit. In some cases, horizontal lines may develop across the printout every time the paper passes the failing part of the drum.