Network printing slow after updating to Tiger, InDesign from OS 9 PageMaker

Question

Sorry for the "old" OS talk, but this is "new" to this shop (a small newspaper). Long overdue, I upgraded our 8 G4s to Tiger from OS 9. They're all networked to a G5, where all files are stored (graphics mostly). This G5 was installed a year ago with Tiger and served as a file server, connected via Ethernet (and SharePoints), to the OS 9 Macs. The printer is a color copier, an Océ cm2520, and DID a great job printing tabloid pages from PageMaker 7. The pages are comprised of mostly ads saved as PDFs, and some text. The pages range in size from less than 1mb to upwards of 10mb. The printer has 500mb of storage plus a 40gb HD built-in.
With OS 9 & PageMaker, tabloid pages would come out in less than one minute, the largest might've taken 3-4 minutes (big graphics & color). Now, with Tiger & InDesign CS3, the same pages take at least 15 minutes apiece to print! And even much longer when more than one page is sent at a time. The spooling part goes very quickly, but the printer takes forever to process the jobs. Nothing else has changed other than the OS and ID CS3. I did reinstall the printer with the current-most driver but no difference. I tried PDFing the pages and printing those, and that cut the print time about in half, which is still way too long and not practical on a "production" day. Small ID files still print quickly, but these PDF-ridden tabloid pages are ridiculous.
I first thought it was ID, but now am wondering if it might have something to do with how/where print jobs are spooled in OSX. Can anyone shed some light on where print files go once the Print button is hit? Is there a secret cache/print queue that might need cleaning out? Do the spooled jobs reside on the sending Macs or on the file server? I can't imagine that this one-year-old Océ printer just went bad coincidentally at the same time as the software upgrades.
Thanks for any help with this problem!

Answer 1

With no insight whatsoever from the manufacturer of the copier, I reformatted the internal hard disk. Life is back to normal! Apparently these HDs get fragged just like any other, so a periodic reformatting may take care of sluggish performance. Either that or the original formatting of the internal HD wasn't "compatible" with OS X.