i've use maxtor 40gb b4.. in a year got a lot of bad sector already.. then change to 80gb maxtor also(coz the cheapest ).. right now im using it about 1 year.. 2 partition there 40/40.. everytime each partition got less than 1gb space, the partition started to lost.. windows only detected one partition after boot.. but luckily can format.. even loss the data after formatting working normal again.. this thing happen twice to me..   so i need to left more than 1gb space in each partition to avoid data loss..