OSX Tiger / Mac Mini Disk Slowdown

Ok so I have a couple of Mac Mini's one for me and one for the wife. well hers suffers from endless coloured wheels and appears to be waiting on disk i/o to complete. Both systems are exactly the same spec, OSX Tiger is the same 10.4.6. with identical set of updates.
I suspect either a disk problem or perhaps fragmentation, has anyone else seen the same problem ?
Derek
Mac Mini Mac OS X (10.4.6) 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 1GB Memory

You're most welcome. Glad to help!
The "up to 35 seconds" is for the hard drive itself to spin-up from Standby mode. The spin-up time varies somewhat by manufacturer, disk rotational speed (RPM), etc.
You wrote: "Only fly in the ointment is the fact that my mac mini was configured in an identical way and didn't exihbit the problem. I checked the disk firmware versions and they were also identical. Thoughts?"I suspect it depends on how you each of you use your individual Macs:
• You may be performing activities that are reading or writing to the hard drive before it reaches the inactivity time limit for spin-down.
• You wife may be performing tasks that require far less disk activity, with more of "the action" taking place in RAM, allowing the hard drive to spin down after ten minutes of inactivity if "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" is checked.
PS: You may want to mark my post here as Solved as it solved your problem and may help others with the same problem that find your topic know the post that contains the answer. Click the Solved button in that post above.
Marking posts that are helpful or solve the problem as Helpful or Solved, respectively, helps others to find answers and awards points to those who take the time to respond. See "Why reward points?".
Marking a topic as Answered indicates the question is resolved, but only you, as the person who asked the question, can mark posts as Helpful or Solved. The "Answered" status neither awards points nor provides an indication to others of the posts that were either helpful or solved the problem.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

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For information about the Other category in the Storage display, see this support article. If the display seems to be inaccurate, try rebuilding the Spotlight index.
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Do the same in other applications, such as Aperture, that have an internal Trash feature. Then restart the computer. That will temporarily free up some space.
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