🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm experiencing some odd behaviour with my ATARI SH204 hard disk.
Does anyone recognize these symptoms:

    On what seem to be random disk accesses  (reads  AND  writes)  my
    drive  does what sounds like the initialization procedure it goes
    through  on  power up and the disk operation fails.   If  I  then
    redo the disk operation immediately it has no problem.

    Sometimes I will go for long intervals with  no  occurence  other
    times I'll take one of these hits every couple of minutes.

    Also, when the disk gets moderately full (3/4) seeks can take  as
    long  as  30  seconds and I think i've had some take considerably
    longer though  I  never  timed  any  longer  than  30.   Is  this
    reasonable behavior?

I am trying to get an idea of what the problem may be and if I can fix
it without having the unit repaired.  To date I have not opened the unit
to check cable connections and chip seating.  I have checked the external
cable and it is firmly connected.

--j.a.tainter