I have one of those cards. My *vague* understanding of the situation was that the Open Firmware version of the card had a larger capacity ROM than the PC versions and thus doing it required some serious "hackage". (Either replacing the EEPROM or using a modified version of the Mac ROM with some functionality stripped out.) Mostly I was interested in it because supposedly the Mac version of the card was usable in Sun Ultra machines, but... I pretty quickly lost interest in the Ultra 10 so the situation resolved itself. (There's only so much amusement to be had in endlessly recompiling NetBSD packages.)
Anyway... as the proud (?) owner of a Rev. 2 B&W I'll have to say that some of the weird voodoo you're seeing with IDE drives isn't confined to the early models. I forget what the laundry list was precisely, but I know I went through several drives of several brands and found issues installing OS X on about half of them. 40 GB IBM/Deskstar drives, for instance, even let me "install" on them, but on the first reboot I'd be presented with a (\) "NO!" symbol, which I'd never even seen before.
My general advice on the subject after all that is this: If you have the original cable in place jumpering the drive for "cable select" *should* work, but if you suspect a cabling problem a 40 pin cable and jumpering "master" should work. Don't use an 80 pin cable and jumper for "master", that causes strangeness and pain. Assuming your cabling layout is correct if you continue to have problems swap drives.
It's odd you're having trouble with a Maxtor, btw. That's the one brand that for me reliably worked on both the B&W and a trayload iMac. (Another machine with sketchy IDE support.) Of course, there's no rhyme or reason in it anyway, so it's probably down to the specific *drive* whether you'll see problems.