Yeah, I have had the same issues with other Maxtors, and a few with some others (early Seagates and Fujitsus) and it's pretty much really slow access. It's actually common that what is dying is the controller board, not the actual platters. It keeps screwing up the data transfer and locks up the bus when it keeps making errors (like constantly requesting the bus and sending bad data) and makes the system sluggish to the point that sometimes it takes several seconds for the mouse to redraw. I have seen it happen in windows and Linux as well. So what you really aren't seeing is a failure of the platters or read head, what you are seeing is the controller board.I named this drive Pepito, and in the end, it really did end up being the spawn of Satan.
(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squee#Pepito for details)
It took 32 hours to move 11gb of data off the drive.
The entire time, my system was nearly comatose. I couldn't even use Adium.
At least it afforded me plenty of time to work on music and clean my apartment.
The drive is a Maxtor D540X-4K, 5400rpm, 2mb cache, 12ms seek.
I've read in a couple places that this particular drive is known for this sort of thing.
What a pain in the butt.
Thanks for all the info, Franklinstein.
Like you said, I think it's failing. I'm going to check it with some kind of diagnostic tool later to make sure... then pull it apart for the metals. Some things just deserve vengeful disassembly.
Anyways, that bit of info is not going to help. What WOULD help is if you can get another drive like it, and replace the controller board, you would get the data off easily.