Drive was manufactured 24th Jan 2006. I did quite a lot of reading up about the problem. Maxtor is fully aware of the issue, as evidenced by the acknowledgement they have placed on their site. They claim that a firmware update (on the hdd) is necessary to fix the problem, however, they do not make the update readily available. Instead, one has to send them an email stating the problem and the drive serial number and allll kinna madness. I played their game and sent the email, twice, only to get NO response even up to now after 2 months. I even went as far as to update the motherboard's BIOS to the latest version (MSI Socket AM2K9N4 Ultra), still no dice.
I am disgruntled, and up until now I was relatively gruntled. I used to love Maxtor, but this was just the last straw. As I said before, it will work great for anyone with a non-nforce chipset.