Yes, ive had this with many maxtor and quantum drives. 
A similar problem, which is worse to try to del with, is when the spindle
bearing lubricant forms a mist in the housing and deposits on the platter,
sticking the heads up and causing them to bind to the platter when the
disk is not running, and making spinning up difficult (The air flow keeps
the head ok while runnign, but the crap on it eventually will lead to a
head crash) this is easily solved with a good smack to the disk with
somethign heavy, to torque the housing against the spindle/platters. 
The other problem is easier to fix- this is of course the bearing
lubricant drying up or settling. My preferred solution is to open the disk
in a nice dust-free room, take off the spindle cap, and put a few drops of
zep-45 on the bearing, let it settle in overnight, and then the disk spins
up beautifully. 

On Mon, 3 Jan 2000, Chris Tribo wrote:
> 
>     I seem to remember reading that Maxtor drives of this era occasionally
> had problems with "stiction" where the spindle bearings became frozen and
> the drive would not spin up. If you have it plugged into your VAXstation,
> simply typing show dev should spin up the HD. On your DECstation, you could
> type boot 5/rzx/netbsd even if it doesn't exist, it should still spin up the
> drive. If the spindle is stuck, you might try removing the wait spin jumper
> (or all the jumpers if you can't find it) and rapidly power cycle the drive
> with an extra power supply. (At least disconnect the other devices and the
> motherboard) to see if that works. I've also heard of people tapping the
> drives with a rubber mallet in such a way as to coerce the the spindle free.
> I can't say I recommend that, nor opening the drive up to free it manually.
> (Even though I have done it several times on older drives).

i agree with him, use caution and dont be too surprised if it still fails
:) in any case, if you have stiction, you should start looking for another
disk to replace it with, and in the meantime keep the one you have
spinning. 

happy hacking,
isildur