This drive works fine with kernels which have Jeff Garzik's libata patch applied. I installed it on Sept 18, 2004 with a Slackware-10.0 CD1 iso image that an LQ member has made, which can be downloaded from http://4elements.4mg.com/#top. This patch is applied and compiled for the 2.4.26 kernel. You must use "cfdisk /dev/sda" to partition the drive. Once I got it setup I compiled 2.6.7. As of today (Sept 23, 2004) there is a bootdisk for 2.4.27 (which has sata support) available at ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/bootdisks/ and they now have packages, and source, for 2.6.7 and 2.6.8.1 kernels.

My hdparm results with the defaults are:
/dev/hde:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1404 MB in 2.00 seconds = 700.36 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 168 MB in 3.01 seconds = 55.73 MB/sec

Do not get this drive if you have a Silicon Image RAID chipset. The drive may be compatible with linux, but certainly not with Silicon Image.

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0412.0/0535.html

(snippet)
The issue is that the SiI 311x controllers send out packets (called "FIS's" in SATA-land) that are not multiples of 512 bytes. This is perfectly legal according to SATA spec, but early drive firmwares (notoriously Seagate in this case) were written with the assumption that the FIS's would be multiples of 512 bytes.
(/snippet)

I've used a couple of these drives with a SiI 3112 SATA controller, and I've had mixed sucess. They work fine with FC3, but the FC4 install program bombs when it loads the sata_sil driver. Normally I would not mention that in the HD review since it appears to be a controller bug, but the previous reviewer's comments made me think differently.

Ditto the above comment about using the Seagate 7200.7 drives with Silicon Image SATA controllers. Comments from LKML tend to blame Seagate more than SiI. There is a kernel patch by Tejun Heo available that helps a little bit, but performance is still well below expectations.

For what it's worth it seems to work OK with the Intel 82801 (ICH6) SATA controller.